If you have been looking at the internet and trying to decide if you want to develop an online business, you have undoubtedly seen references to the fact that you want to establish yourself as an expert. Whether you are selling paint in Melbourne or china in Dresden, you will want to be the expert in your field.
The reason for establishing this expert status is twofold. On the one hand it is valuable for you customers and visitors to have a site to turn to when they need expert advice. On the other hand the search engines love expert sites with valuable information.
Let's look at the second reason first. Your sites have to be valuable sites for the search engines' web crawlers to rank your site highly enough to show up in the search results lists near the top. You want your site near the top of the list, because when people do a search they tend to look at the first page of results, and if the do not find what they are looking for in there, then they generally change their parameters and just do another search. This is why you want to get a high search engine ranking and doing so will increase web site traffic.
Now consider your website from the search engines' point of view. The search engine wants to deliver the best results that it can for its customers, who also happen to be your website's visitors. If a website at the top of the list does not have the information that it claims to have, the person searching will be disappointed. If this disappointment happens frequently enough, the person may start to use another search engine to find what they are looking for, and the search engine has lost a customer.
So if you consider that you want the person who finds your site to be really happy that they did, they you are valuable to the search engine, because you made a happy customer.
And that brings us back to the first reason that you want to be an expert, and that is that you also want a happy customer. So this synergistic relationship between you and the search engine can be achieved by web site optimisation. Here are some things to consider when you are planning your web page design and establishing yourself as an expert. You can also look for a good SEO agency to help you with a specialised plan.
Remember that content is king. If you have really good, useful content your customers will visit you time and time again to find what they are looking for. If you keep your content fresh it will give people a reason to visit your site frequently.
If you have had your website name for a long time it is established. An older, established site gives the impression of a stable site, and if you back this up with great content you will have a winning combination for you customers and the search engines.
One of the most valuable things that can happen to your site is that other respected sites begin to link to your site. These are called backlinks, and search engines consider a backlink from a highly rated site one of the most important points to consider when evaluating the value of your website. So the more highly rated sites that you can get to link to your website, the better you search engine ranking will be.
SEO consultants will tell you that your website needs to keep up with current marketing online trends like RSS Feeds, video, podcasting, etc. Not only does your content need to be updated frequently, but the method by which you deliver the content needs to be current also. So always keep your site as simple as possible, but do employ some state of the art techniques to add value for your customers. A sem company can be very useful for exactly that.
When you are looking at a website if it ends with a .gov or an .edu, you automatically consider it an authority site. Search engines do the same thing. If you check the open directory many of the listings are authority sites. There are other sites that are instantly authoritative. For example, hubs are groups of articles and generally ranked pretty highly. Social Networks and blogs are both authoritative to some degree. Directories offer very specific information and are considered authorities in that niche.
Search engines are looking at these sites with an ever more critical eye. So if you are going to expend the energy to write a piece to use for linking, make sure that you post it on a quality site respected by the search engines.
You can also post to less popular sites, but you get a bigger bang for your buck when you post to higher ranking sites. So it does not hurt to have a little of both in your bag of tricks.
So start to establish yourself as an authority. Do it a little at a time. Pick a subject that you love and keep updating your website content. As you research and update your site a curious thing will happen. You will actually become --- an expert.