Google Can Be Great
March 8th, 2010

As always, we welcome you to another amazing week of the Synergy Marketing Consultants Blog. Your readership helps for us to continue to prove that the internet is a fabulous way to promote your business in a very inexpensive way. Last week, this blog touched on the popular social networking sites that are out there like Facebook and Twitter. We commented on the success that many business owners have had promoting their companies on these sites.

Well, of course, there are a number of other sites out there that allow you to increase the reach of your business. One of the most obvious is the ever-popular Google search engine.

As put by Derek Gehl from his August 2005 post on Entrepreneur.com, “If you're not already advertising with Google, it's time to get cracking! With more than 81.9 million unique visitors each month, Google.com is a huge source of potential traffic for your business.”

As Gehl explains, “Google has a wide variety of services, tools, labs and advertising avenues that every online entrepreneur should know about--yet many people are unaware that Google is much more than 'just' a search engine.”

Gehl outlines a number of ways in which companies can utilize Google to help with their promotional strategies. Firstly, he stresses the importance of getting your website ranked. This way, your potential customers will be directed to your website whenver they type in something of relevance to your industry in their search engines.

Imagine being one of the first restaurants to pop up when someone types in “great places to eat”. Gehl explains how this can be achieved: “To show up in the first page or two of results, you'll need to optimize your website to achieve the highest ranking possible. You may already be aware that you need to spend some time getting the right keywords on your website and increasing your 'link popularity.'”

Gehl reveals that Google genreally only looks at the first block of text it encounters on your your website and uses it display on search result pages. So, to catch the eye of potential customers, it makes sense to have your first paragraph be as interesting as possible. He also suggests that it be about 300 words in length including a number of “keywords”.

If you have done your best to optimize your site, Google will research your webpages. However, it isn't possible to know exactly when they will “crawl” your pages and how much of each page they will index. Gehl advises that you submit your site to Google Sitemaps in order to increase the likelihood of your entire site being “spidered”.

He explains: “After submitting your site, Google creates and stores an XML file that allows for instant updates and indexing whenever your site's content changes. This is like having your own data cable running from your computer directly to Google!”

We'll continue to visit this topic in tomorrow's blog.