Hello,
I just built a website last night (using one of the free providers) and it's published and looks fairly decent, but is anyone else able to see it or do they have to type in the address?

Someone mentioned "optimizing" their site... I am not rich ~ just starting out, but do want reasonable visibilty in my State ~ Any ideas? Recommendations? Suggestions???

(my business name isn't my "avatar" name... I was able to buy the domain name for my business - YAY!!!)

You did not type in the address.

Wesha

You can optimize your website yourself.

Essentially you need to use key words and tags throughout your site content, and then submit you site to various search engines. Every few weeks or so the search engine bots will crawl the web for new content and index it.

So whenever a potential client types in a phrase and you site matches any or all of the phrase, it will start to show up in search engines.

There are other factors that go into play when trying to get a first page ranking, but that is how the process begins.

I understand that you can optimize your site yourself, but since I know nothing about doing that, I paid $1200 for a service to do it for me. WELL WORTH IT!! Within a week of having it optimized, Macy's Dept Store's REgional office found me and I've been doing an event for them about 2-3 times a month ever since. I picked up a 1700 cookies order and they found me by searching "cookies indianapolis". ALL of my corporate christmas parties this year were found by searching "caterers indianapolis". I ask every client how they found me and believe me, the optimizing has DEFINITELY paid for itself.

I'm kicking myself in the south end for not doing it MONTHS ago!

Either figure out how to do it yourself or find the money to have it done. Smartest move you can make.

I also did not have the budget for paying someone else, so I optimized my site myself. I am currently on the first page of results for "wedding cakes __________ (my area)" and "cake decorators _______(again, my area). I am 2nd on yahoo, 8th on MSN and 3rd on Google.

My site has a large banner that goes across the bottom. I created a text box with various keywords and put it behind the banner. This way, the keywords are on every page, but not viewable because they are behind the banner.

There should also be a place on your "management" page on your site building tool that will allow you to submit your site to various search engines. Also, check out where the meta tags are on your site building tool. The meta tags are the keywords that the search engines will look for. This is usually in the same place where you put the page title and description (this is what people see in the summary of search results.

Hi indydebi,

Can you post the name of the company who optimized your site for $1200? Also, can you give me the name of the company who designed your site or if you did it yourself, can you tell me what software you used?

Thanks

Main Street Host http://www.mainstreethost.com/
I have a contact name and email if you want it ... PM me. They gave me a pricing deal and I think it was because I kept telling them "I don't have any money to spend right now", so the price kept coming down.

I get my website thru Register.com. Costs me $15 a month for 20 pages (something like $4.95/month for just 5 pages). I did it myself. Had the initial 5 pages up and running in just under 2 hours and that included figuring out how to put the photos on (the hard part).

My Bannas Cookies website is a spin off from my cake/catering website, so it's also thru Register, but my son-in-law, who does computers for a living, kicked it up a notch for me ... I have no idea how to do all the stuff he did on this site. And our deal was if he sets it up, then I can't touch it.