The Success Series: Don’t be virtually ignored!

So, do you feel sometimes like you are alone on a desert island? That's a great analogy when it comes to those Search Monsters that guide users to your website. Or that don't! And that brings to mind a question to which you probably should know the answer: Do you even have any idea of how to get found (or are you firing flares hoping to be seen someday)?

Building a website today can be a great (and profitable) accomplishment, as we've talked about over the past year. What we haven't spoken about is what it takes to be found by those search engines. To help you find more success in this regard, I've compiled a map that will help you help others find your desert island.
 

Step 1. Learn the A-B-Cs of webmaster tools. Both major search engines (Google and Bing) have a free service that will allow you to manage your domain. When you build your website, you need to create a sitemap and upload it to your webmaster account. The sitemap tells the search engine where you have placed your information (just like a landscape plan tells a customer where the shrubs are going). The sitemap is critical to helping you be found, so you'll need to create one or find someone to create one for you.
 

Step 2. Being with Bing is a good thing. Bing Webmaster Tools let you submit 50 URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) a month, which helps the search engine find your information more accurately. Submitting each web page's URL allows you to tell people looking for things that you offer, "Hey! Look over here!" in a geek kinda way.
 

Step 3. Blog, blog, blog and blog some more. Blogging with specific keywords or relevant information and then linking what you blog to your website will help with page ranking (where your site pages are found when a person searches for information).

Obviously, being on page 1 is very good; conversely, being on page 100 is very bad. In order to accomplish the former, you will need to blog about topics that readers will find interesting and topics that are related to your site. If you are a landscaper, appropriate topics might be plants, trees and techniques—not your favorite Nascar team (you can leave that for Facebook).
 

Step 4. Use those social bookmarks. Social bookmarking creates links on sites like Delicious that allow a user to access his or her favorite links via any computer at anytime. It's a way to make your website more visible. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better chance it has of being found. Social bookmarking is a fast, free way to drive traffic to your site as well as to drive search engines to your site.
 

Step 5. It's all about content. How many times have you been searching for a product or service and when you find it, you haven't found any more information than you already knew? That's why content is THE KEY to site ranking with search engines and site users. Remember how you feel when you make a search, and then create online content that compels people to visit—and to return to—your site.

It doesn't hurt to add more keyword-rich information—in fact, it helps—and be sure to link any virtual marketing you do to your site, blog or Facebook page. The more mentions you make, the more interest you create —and the more likely your message is to being found on that Holy Grail, Page One.

Understanding how to "get found" is an important part of building your virtual business. Talking with a professional about building your virtual world the right way will save you time and money over the long haul – and it will bring you more customers.

That's the good part.