To Google or Be Googled

To Google or Be Googled By Christie Turley, www.NotSoDumbBlond.com

I Was Googled

It was just yesterday that an old friend of mine got in touch with me by Googling my first and last name. He found all sorts of articles, which mentioned my name, including my own website as #1.

Googling Your Name is Money in Your Pocket

This reminded me of a client I had who was nowhere to be seen when you Googled their name. This was a huge problem since they were 100% referral and many people searched for their company name on the Internet to find their website. It took two months for them to start showing up, but when they did, it was a HUGE money maker for them. Potential customers who had been referred were finally able to find them.

With the pursuit of optimizing a site for certain keywords, so many companies forget to optimize for their own company name.

The Proof is in the Puddin'

A recent study by Nielsen//Netratings suggest that when web users know the name of a website, they prefer to type in a domain name in the "search box" of Google or Yahoo, rather than typing a domain name into the browser bar.

What does this tell you? Well, it says that if someone has heard of your company, they're either going to type in your website name or your domain name into the search box and your website better be ready and waiting at the top of the search engines.

Do YOU show up when your name or company name is Googled?

Here's How You Do It

To search engine optimize (SEO) your company name on your website, here are some tips. (This isn't an exhaustive list of all that you can do, but it's enough to get you started.)

** Choose one page on your website to optimize for your company name. It might be your Home page, Contact Us page or About Us page. I recommend your About Us page – it seems that it's easier and better to talk about you on that page than any other page. Conversely, the Home page should be all about them (What's In It For Me?) – not about you.

** Add your company name to the ALT tags where possible. ALT tags are the tags that are connected to the images of your website. Search engines don't index images, so any text on your site that is in the form of an image won't get indexed. The search engines read the text and the keywords in the ALT tags instead.

** Add your company name to your Meta Tags: namely, Meta titles, Meta description and Meta keywords. A recent study showed that only 34% of Web site owners knew enough to include a simple keyword Meta tag on their website. Therefore, if you add a keyword and properly optimize the rest of your page, you'll be doing more than 66% of website owners. Of the 34% of owners who DO add Meta data, so many forget to add their company name to the titles, description and keywords! They only remember to add keywords related to their products/services. If YOU remember to do this, think how much further ahead you'll be...

** Add your company name as a keyword to your chosen page's body and work it into the content at least 3-4 times. Try to place it one time nearer to the top of the page body. Repeat your company name at the start and end of your paragraphs and near the end of the body. That way, search engines won't make any mistake about the content since your company name is used repetitively and throughout the content.

** Where possible, include your company name within your hyperlinks. For example on the Home page, you could include the words "Contact XYZ Company" within the hyperlink copy instead of just "Contact Us".

** Finally be patient. With these steps and ONLY these steps, I helped one company go from not showing up on Google at all, to #1 in Google for their company name.

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Christie Turley is a web marketing expert and author of the Not-So- Dumb Blond Internet Guides.
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