If you build it, will they come?

Throughout the movie "Field of Dreams" Kevin Costner here's a voice telling him "if you build it... they will come". Of course, the story involves the relationship between a father and a son and the possible insanity of building a ballfield in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa so all of the past baseball greats have a place to play.

Your website is that ballfield and you are Kevin Costner.

The Purpose of your Website

People decide to start a website for many different reasons... first and foremost is the lucrative nature of online business. More times than not, most people know of someone, or get the idea they can simply slap a site together, or purchase a site on E-Bay, obtain hosting for it, sit back and wait for the people to come. Sadly, life on the Internet just doesn't happen that way.

Can anyone looking for your service or product find your website with ease?

Many online business owners report to us that they could only be found by searching search engines for a combination of their last name + first name.

While it is good that they can be found for the combination of their last name + first name, only people who already know them or have heard about them can search for the names. The vast majority of online buyers don't know your name, so they are searching for more generic terms, representing your products and services.

For example, if Jessica Brown is a business coach, someone who has heard about her from another client, or someone who met her through online networking, might search for information about her and her business by searching for "Jessica Brown".

However, many more people will use the search engines by typing in phrases such as "business coach" or "business coaching". These are the people who don't know who Jessica Brown is, but they already have a need for her services.

In order for you to be found on generic terms relevant to your business, you need to perform search engine optimization (or SEO) for your web site. Search engine optimization is the process of modifying content of a web page and meta-information to improve the search engine ranking of the page. Meta-information includes certain HTML tags (title, heading, emphasized text, keyword and description meta-tags), as well as the internal (links between pages on the same site) and external (links between pages on different sites) link structure of a web site.

Now it's time for you to do some digging:

Use a few different search engines to find your web site. Does it come up when you search for your first name + last name? What about a generic term for your business or profession?

Find good generic keywords for your business. They could be keywords that are related to your business, profession, or specific products or services that you sell. The best keywords are the ones that have many people searching for them, but don't have too many other web sites using them.

Use the terms you found to perform search engine optimization for your web site. This involves changing the content, as well as meta-information and link structure for your web site.

Just remember... it's not how many come to your website that matters, it's how many of them are already interested in your product or service that matters.