Let’s face it. It’s an online world. You have to get good,
or at least knowledgeable, about how the Internet works and
how to promote your business online!

Over the next 3 weeks I will be posting internet related lessons and ways to boost your search engine ranking.

Lesson 1:  Website Basics

Think-Geo.  As local businesses, we need to keep this in mind when adding content (the written words and pictures). If you have a school located in Albany, New York- you don’t want to be drawing leads from people in Albany, Georgia- especially if you are giving away free gifts!

Things to boost your local ranking:

  1. Every one of your website pages needs to have your address and phone number. Put it at the top and at the bottom. You want the webcrawlers  to have no problem figuring out where you are.
     
  2. Your Keywords should contain the all of you local markets’ city names. You can realistically draw from a 15-20 mile radius, so be sure to include those neighboring cities.
     
  3. When picking a Domain Name (the website name), make sure it contains your main city name in it: 
     
    Saratoga    Karate.com or SarasotaMartialArts.com
  4. Create a blog and create blog posts regularly. When you do create posts, make sure you have City keywords in the title too. If your main website content does not change- adding blog posts is the same as adding content. You can dominate the entire page 1 of Google… Wouldn’t that be cool.

    When ranking web pages for broad keywords, like ones for my webstore can be a challenge- but local search engine domination is pretty easy. I have had blog posts take position 1 in the search pages in 4 hours.
     

  5. You can have more than 1 domain name that points to your main web site. You may have seen those funny numbers: 205.157.76.10  These are called IP Addresses (Internet Protocol). They are the actual numerical pointer to your website. The Domain name is a pointer to the number. The reason being: SaratogaKarate in much more memorable and search friendly than 205.157.76.10 (how’s that for a super egg-head piece of trivia…). You can point many domain names to the same IP Address Number.

And don’t make the mistake of creating a information packed landing page (the web page where your leads will first land).

Remember: your website is designed for 2 things: 1 get a prospect to call; 2 get a prospect to call!

Dedicated to Increasing Your Student Count

Mark Beagle
The Renegade School Owner