Have you ever seen something you like?  Do you ever have to have something right at that very same minute?  Are you impulsive and buy things without thinking too much?  Do you think research is for the birds?  If you have answered yes to one of these questions, you’re like me.  Not all the time, but sometimes.

I read the first two paragraphs of an article and complete what the author wants to say in my mind.  I think can, I think I can, I think I can…  I think it’s some line about a little train going up a hill.  Having pure believe in oneself or thinking there will be no sunlight when you pull up your pants is a good thing.  To a certain point.

Sometimes you must acknowledge that you are not a leader in your field by continue reading, even if you think you know what’s to come.  Web links is one of those fields that I thought I know what it is, and when I was done reading one article, I slap a guru sticker on my back and started my links page.

I read about all the wonderful tools and the thousands of websites out there waiting for me to link to my website.  I started with the enthusiasm of 200 school boys meeting the Springboks for the first time.  I have since grown up a bit.

Then, after 5 days and only one link back to my site, I realize that there must be more to this.  Everybody these days are supposed experts in their fields.  These days SEO is a term that is being thrown around on most websites.  Please read my article about SEO explained for some insightes about the subject.

If you have browsed around and read up a bit, you have come to the conclusion that linking is probably the most important part of your website.  I will write a few articles about linking and what you should do and what to avoid.

Search Engine Optimization explained for the normal user.

The word sort of explains what it, but do you really understand what it means?  Ok, so most of you might have heard people say: “Google it.”  People normally say that when they are looking for information on the Internet. Maybe you have used the term yourself.  Maybe it was how you landed on my site.  Maybe you already know more than you think and you just want someone to put pieces together.

So you are looking for something on the net.  You need someone to build you a website, or you just want to know who played a defender for your soccer team in the 1990 world cup.  You open Google and enter a search term in the box and click on Google search.  Google go and do its thing and give you a list of results that correspond to your search term.  Remember it.  Google give you results that correspond to your search term.

Just think about that for a moment.  If you are looking for “affordable web design” you probably landed on my site that is www.voiceconnect.co.za.   The reason for that is a bit more technical and we will not go into right now.  Thus, when you think of your website, you must also think of what search terms people will enter to get to your website.

Maybe your domain is johndoepartners.com and you are an accounting firm.  Chances are that people do not know that you exist and thus will not enter “john doe partners” as their search term when looking for an accounting firm.  They will rather enter “accounting firms” or something like it.

This means, if you would like people to land on your site when they use the search term “accounting firms,” you must optimize your site for that term.  Thus, Search Engine Optimization is optimizing your site for some search term that you want to associate with your site.

When your site is number 1 in Google, it’s really number 1 for a certain search term.  When you enter that term, your site appears as the first site in Google’s results.

Let’s look at our site for example.  Our companies name is VoiceConnect and one of the things we specialize in, is affordable web design.  Nobody would enter the word VoiceConnect in the Google search box when they are looking for affordable web design.  They would rather enter “affordable web design” and Google would return the results and they would click on our link to land on this website.

We have optimize our site for the term affordable web design to make sure that people get to our site when they enter that term.  What about other terms like “website design” for example you might think?  Because we are a relatively new company and do not have the marketing budget of the big existing companies, we had to focus on a lesser used term for a start.

Remember, people can pay Google to be part of the sponsored links and they appear in the yellow box above the first results, or on the right of the search results.  When you start, you start with something that you can compete in and build from there.  Nobody just start and push people from the top spot without some growing pains.

When you are thinking about your content, think about what terms people would use to land on your site and incorporate it in your content.  Think about and get about 3 terms to focus on.  We can assist you with that.   Getting your site on top of Google searches takes planning and it takes time.  It is also not a once off job.  You have to work to get your site up this list and you must work to keep it there.

We can help you with your SEO, but as you can see, it takes lots of work and time.  That is why we could build your website and hand it over to you, or we could build and maintain your site for a monthly fee.  Everything is about choices.  If you just want your site to be a source of information for the people that knows your URL, that’s fine.  But if you want to use your site as a tool for finding new customers and building your business, you need to get your site up the list.

Again, you have choices.  You can pay Google to be part of the sponsored links, or you can pay us to help you get up the list.