Small Business Online - If You Build It Will They Find It?

A Home Business Article Contributed by Elizabeth Fox-Wise

Building a Small Online Business

So you are building a small business online. The Internet is full of people shopping and looking for services and it is truly a land of opportunity for the budding entrepreneur. But it is also a huge vast space - empty and void in some places and over congested in others.

If you build an online small business, will they find it?

Imagine trying to toss a dime into a shot glass in a dark stadium. Or trying to find a particular website, your small business for instance, without search engines. Both feats would be almost impossible.

Without good directions to your small business - in the case of an online small business this is your exact URL, searchers would be out of luck.

Fortunately The Internet is full of resources to help people find what they are looking for. Your job, as a small business owner, is to make the best possible use of these resources.

The Map That You are Adding Your Small Business To

The World Wide Web has grown to millions of sites and billions of pages. The need for search engines has become enormous. Studies estimate that approximately 550 million searches are conducted each day by users world wide. And of course that number rises each day.

In the same sense, as any Web user knows, a typical search will yield hundreds or even thousands of resulting matches. Most users will not venture out beyond the first thirty results. Either because they have satisfied their need by then - or got too overwhelmed and gave up. So with most searchers most likely to click on only the first thirty highest-ranked results, it is critical to make sure your small business rises to the top of the list.

Complicating the issue even further for the small business owner, is the sheer numbers of search engines and web directories that exist!

Does a Small Business Have to Register with All the Search Engines?

Absolutely not! Experts agree that doing so would only be a waste of money, time and other resources. There are really only a few worth bothering with. Seven major search sites account for 99% of all searches conducted on the Internet. Those are the ones that your small business MUST be registered with. These include in order of most used, Google, Yahoo, AllTheWeb , AltaVista , AskJeeves , Inktomi , and the lesser know OpenDirectoryProject.

There are two major ways to optimize the chance of your small business showing up in someone's search results.

First carefully identify your small business key words. These are the words that your potential customers will most likely search for when looking for the goods or services that your small business provides. Each page should contain two or three keywords placed to help people find you on the web. Choose keywords that are simple, coherent and consistent to what your small business does.

Secondly, keep in mind that search engines love links. The more sites you have linked to your small business site, the much higher you are likely to rank in the search results. Links are the same thing as votes. From a Search Engines point of view, the more votes you have, the more likely there is to be high quality information at your small business site.