Yesterday, I described a problem that a lot of home stagers and other businesses have. When your web site starts out with a splash page, and/or your site uses a lot of flash coding you can become invisible to the little bots Google and others send around the internet to index sites. And that means your competitors have an advantage over you in terms of their ability to out rank you on Google and the other search engines. That costs you opportunities, and that means less jobs, and less money.

Today, I will briefly share more on what you need to do to mitigate the situation short of redesigning your entire web page. The “on page” factors that the Google Bots look for are just a part of the equation. And while lacking all the umph! having them would provide, you can still get yourself some traction using “off page” factors. There are a variety of off page things to do, but they basically boil down to getting BACK LINKS.

You do this by posting on other peoples blogs, writing articles, posting on web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and others.  When you do, you don’t want to link to your splash page if you have one. Instead link to your home page, or another page on your site that is relevant to the topic.

So, picking on my Friend Allegra again, I would have her sign her posts as “www.styledandsold.com/home.html” rather than “www.styledandsold.com”  It may look a bit odd at first, but it will take google to the page that matters and will count as a backlink in many cases. (not all but that is too long a discussion for now.)

Better yet, are situations where instead of signing with your URL you are able to use an anchor tag.  For example, if you are writing an article to post in an article directory instead of using your url, say Allegra Dioguardi is a Hamptons Home Staging Expert.

In this case, the keywords Allegra wants to rank for on Google is “Hamptons Home Staging”.

If she is on a Blog Site like Active Rain that has a Link tool (Looks like three links of a chain) in its WYSIWYG editor, she would highlight the words Hamptons Home Stager, and then insert her URL as the link, using the /home.html version.

That way when the bots find the link they provide not only a backlink but also identify the keywords at being relevant to the site. This process starts building keyword status for your website.

If you are on a site where you need to use html code you would build the link with a standard opening

<a href=”   and then insert your url, again with the /home.html (Or another page on your site) and end it with a   “>  Once that’s done, you add the keyword you want to rank for—  Hamptons Home Staging and a closing code which is  </a>

So the completed phrase in HTML is <a href=”http://www.styledandsold.com/home.html”>Hamptons Home Staging</a>  When this is put in the HTML of a site, anyone reading the phrase once published would only see:Hamptons Home Staging The words would be highlighted and most people will recognize them as a link. If they click on the link they would be taken to the page.

By virture of this post, Allegra now has a back link to her site.  You want to get as many of these as you can from as many different sites as possible.  Some sites are more valuable than others, but we will cover that in the future.

Focus on your major keyword. For home stagers, the number one word is Home Staging. But as I did for Allegra keep in mind that there are over 6 million web sites with the words “Home staging” in them. You want to rank for Home Staging and your town or what ever the dominant regional term people in your market would be likely to use.

I will be starting my new series on getting ranked by the search engines soon. But since I had several questions on this point I thought I would answer it now.

Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.) The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets. That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line. Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.

Technorati Tags: anchor tags, Keywords, Linking, SEO