GHOST PARTNER :: Help Customers Find You on the Web Using Free Blogs

Help Customers Find You on the Web Using Free Blogs

and how to use our content to connect with client and prospects

These days, Web sites can have tremendous impact on the success of a small business. And unless potential customers can find your Web site, they may not even know you exist.

Most Web site visits originate with a Google search. There are other search engines, of course, but Google is by far the way most people find Web sites.

An entire industry providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has sprung up to optimize Web sites for Google searches. Good SEO companies do a fine job at this, deploying a number of techniques to move Web sites to the top of Google search results pages.

But good SEO is very expensive, complicated, and out of the reach of most small businesses.

Fortunately, there are a couple of strategies any small business owner can use to provide similar results. The only cost for these is a little time spent on a regular basis. Use these techniques and you can get your business' Web site near the top of the first page of a Google search.

Let Google’s Blogger Help Drive Customers to Your Site

Google owns Blogger, a free service that lets you create blogs for your business. Google gives high search rankings to blogs hosted there. So the first step is to start one or more blogs at www.blogger.com. It's easy. It's free. It works. Here's how to make it work for you:

Sign Up – Go to www.blogger.com and click Create a Blog. They'll sign you up and walk you through the process of creating your blog.
Name Your Blog – Name your blog with the phrase you want to optimize. It should be a search phrase likely to be used by potential customers. For example: A sandwich shop that delivers in Metropolis would benefit from a blog named Metropolis Sandwich Delivery. Think long and hard about how people might search for your type of business. Keep it simple and short.
Design Your Blog – Use Blogger's simple tools to pick an attractive template, then choose some of the gadgets available to add photos, information about you and your business, etc. A link to your Web site is an absolute must.
Populate Your Blog – Write a few short blog entries in the blog. Use likely search phrases, again, as titles for these entries. Using our example, titles like "Best Hoagie in Metropolis" or "Metropolis Sandwich Building" would be good. Make sure spelling and grammar are correct in the entries, keep them short and pithy, and add a link to your Web site at the end of each entry.
Update Your Blog – Add new entries at least once a week, again using titles for each entry that are likely search terms customers might use.
Create Another Blog – You can repeat this process as many times as you like, with each blog bearing a likely search engine phrase as its title.
Link to Your Blog – Add a link to each blog near the top of your Web site's home page.

That's it. Once you publish your blog, Google will find and index it in about a week, and your blog's title will show up high in the search results, leading searchers to the blog and to your Web site. How high depends on how well you chose your blog's title and how much competition there is for that phrase. The same applies to the titles of blog entries, although they have a slightly lower priority at Google.