Most Web site owners are obsessed and extremely frustrated with their natural (free) search engine rankings. They want to pull for every word combination someone may use to find them.
Better rankings, “Top 10″ or at least top page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are important. It is possible, but not probable for most sites because although the site owners want those rankings they are unwilling to do what is necessary to attain them.
Great search engine rankings don’t happen by osmosis, simply because you want it to, or because you are good at your profession or because you think you have a better site than those above you. Even having a great looking site if not planned, structured and written, marketed and grown with rankings in mind — in the first place — will not attain the listings everyone salivates over.
It is what it is folks! You need the code and structure the search engine crawlers can read. You need to be relevant to what you want to be found for — extremely relevant to get on that top page. You need concentrated targeted content that caters to customers and crawlers alike.
Most of all you need to be realistic about the competition and saturation of the market you are trying to penetrate. You have to be prepared to be as aggressive as necessary to reach your goals or it simply doesn’t happen. Without this methodology; you’re lost.
Yes, you can spend time and money looking for “solutions” that negate the facts of how to get great rankings. But you’ll just be wasting time and throwing good money after bad. The sooner you embrace the reality of what it takes to attain great rankings over the long haul, the sooner you will enjoy ROI.
At your service,
Judith
You need to have your physical address available on your site. Some sites don’t necessitate that information be on every page (non-eCom sites), so at the very least a physical or mailing address should be on your contact page. By not doing so you give the impression of possibly being a fly-by-night.
Would you give out payment information to a site that had no indication of where there were located? Most onliners will not.
The analogy goes that with no address one can easily disappear without leaving any traceable contact information that a customer could have noted when they decided to do business with you. No address? Folks will probably find one of your competitors who will give them that warm fuzzy.
If you are a home based business and don’t want to expose that address to everyone, you can simply get a P.O. Box to use for your mailing address. Then, at the very least folks know where you are and know where to contact you if needed. When I went completely virtual and left the rat race a couple years ago and moved to the country, I signed up for a P.O. Box for those very reasons.
Yes, having a physical address is more credible and convincing to some than a P.O. Box. In my case being I have been established for over a decade, I am not too concerned about that. Each business needs to make these decisions based on what is best for their business and what perception they want to give.
It’s really a no-brainer and worth the small P.O. Box fees to add that extra level of credibility that is so hard to build online in the first place. When it comes to your Web site, a physical address is required to give your visitors confidence. For eCom sites, you’ll loose business without one.
Why give potential customers an excuse to look elsewhere?
At your service,
Judith
As many as you need to reach your goals! If you just want a business card/brochureware site where folks can contact you or ask questions, a simple starter site may do. But one has to be realistic and realize that a starter site is just that — a start. Any starter site, where the site owner would like to experience ROI, has to be created with plans to grow the site as needed and as market conditions dictate.
When it comes to search engine rankings, the more pages the better. And no, that does not mean babbly useless keyword stuffed verbiage in existence solely to increase the number of pages in your site to manipulate rankings. Unique valuable information worth linking to is what works best.
When you have useful individual pages targeting just one topic or issue, you kill two birds with one stone. You create a concentrated topical page on that issue or topic for search crawlers to index and you give your site visitors information on the one topic they may be seeking at that point in time.
Having mile long pages simply to avoid per page costs by cramming all your information into one “page” that scrolls endlessly is poor design from a usability POV. It also hampers good rankings because the page is about too much to be solidly about any one (or two) things to rank relevantly.
Look at your site as an archive, library or gallery of everything that has to do with your product and service that you will grow perpetually. Web sites should be looked at as a work in progress that is never completed. There will always be something to add, change or integrate!
Getting found, instilling confidence and encouraging inquires is what you want to accomplish, right? Not hesitating to add pages will help you accomplish just that.
At your service,
Judith
