So, now that we are a fully up and running business, we needed to get ourselves a great blog up and running. I figured that the first blog would be about the importance of having a (good) website.
Everybody knows that you should have a website, but a lot of people are going to services like 1&1.com, Web.com, GoDaddy, or some other type of quick website builder - which is good if you're just trying to get your site up and running. But, there is a drawback with using features like that. Yes, you'll be able to have your site up, but they aren't usually good with having a good SEO return on them. Unless you know what you're doing with building websites, you are going to be lost in the vast amount of sites and companies that are also in your industry and area.
So how do you fix this?
Easiest answer is have your site built by a professional - but that does cost money, and not a lot of people can afford a custom website. So, you might want to look at using something like Wordpress.org to build your site the way you like it. Wordpress is a very easy to use service that has a lot of good SEO plugins to help your site be found after you've made it the way you like it.
But, even in doing that, you're stuck in a little bit of a sticky situation. Just having the good plugins really isn't going to get your site up to the top of the rankings. There needs to be continual work done on the site for SEO to get your site up in the rankings. The old way of getting your site up quickly (meta tags) is over. With Google's way of doing rankings, it's a lot harder for smaller companies to get to the top. What we always use is what we call the "6-Pack Rule" - If you go to the gym regularly and eat right and all that fun stuff (have good SEO work done), you're going to get yourself a sweet 6-pack (top rankings) - but as soon as you quit going to the gym (stop SEO work), your 6-pack is going to go away (rankings slip) and to get the 6-pack back, you're going to have to work doubly as hard.
So, one of the first things we always suggest for companies to do when they start, is get yourself a good website and have SEO work started on it right away and always budget for SEO work to be done each month.
There are some books explain the best SEO practices that you can checkout if you are wanting to do it yourself, but be ready for about a good 5-10 hours a week dedicated solely on SEO work.
Keep checking back for new posts - we're going to be doing this quite often.
havik marketing