Checking Your Site’s Online Potential

Before you hire a SEM company, you might want to do a bit of investigation on the Internet to get an idea of what needs to be done to get your site higher up on the rankings. In this article you will also see how you can look up effective keywords that will allow you to raise your reputation on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing.  

Open Up a Search Engine

The first thing to do is to open up a search engine such as Google and enter a couple of keywords that best describe your company. For instance, if you were an attorney in Washington, then you could type in “Washington attorney”. [caption id="attachment_1185" align="alignnone" width="512"] Checking your site's online potential[/caption] This will probably give you a lot of pages, but your first task will be to find out where your own page is (if you have one). The eventual goal is to get to page one of this listing and this is why you need to work out some effective keywords.  

Check Your Competitors

Find your direct competitor’s websites and take a look at which page they are found on the rankings. Chances are, many of them will be pretty high up. The first thing you could do is to go to their website and look at the source code. Search for the following text element, <meta keywords> and analyze what keywords your competitors are using. Even though Google don’t put much "weight" into Meta Keywords these days, this is a good way to gauge the first steps you need to take.  

Check Alternative Keywords

Think of other, creative ways to describe your business.

•  Think of what a person would search for who was looking for something you sold but did not know what it was called.
•  Try and describe your product. Compare those rankings as well to your competitors.

  Using the above process you can quickly compile a list of 10-15 keywords that potential clients may use to describe your services or products.