Making your website more visible

What most web clients want is to make sure people see their sites. Now the designer's job is to create a site first of all that will be seen easily by the spiders (programs that search through the internet) and to submit the site to search engines, but there are things that the client can do to help themselves.

1. Put your website address on every piece of paper that leaves your office. On your business cards, flyers, emails as well as any advertising that you may do in other places.
2. Consider putting your business (if it is a service) or items you sell onto sites like eBay or free sites like Kijiji or Craig's List. One client sells purebred dogs and every time she has puppies available, she posts an ad on kijiji in her city and cities close by and her website traffic shoots up by 200%. And she sells half of her puppies to people who saw her ad on this site.
3. Make sure you on on all affiliated companies sites, as well as putting their sites on your pages. For example, put all association such as local chamber, or professional memberships on your website. If they have a website, link to them. Ask them if they will link to you. This all creates popularity, which in turn helps your site move up the search engine ladder.
4. Use google maps to show where your company is. You can list your business for free with Google and it helps to boost your ranking.
5. Consider a youtube video. If you have a tourism resort, you could make a video about your resort, or you could be more creative like the fellow from Blendex. They've posted these movies on youtube that are very popular called "Will it blend?" In this one, he blends a iphone. Very humourous, but did you know his sales have gone through the roof?
6. Create a blog. If you don't do the updating to your website yourself, and I don't suggest you do as it would put me out of a job, you may want to use a blog to update day to day sales you may have, or if you had a farm or garden centre, talk about what is fresh or upcoming. It is cheaper to update this every day or once a week and do major changes to your website every couple of months to keep it fresh.

The idea is to keep your site fresh, have people coming back to see what else you are selling, have to tell them about your products. And you want prospective clients to find you easily if they do a search. All of the above things will help your business be found when people do a search.