As a web designer who works remotely in Marietta Georgia and it being a densely populated area I tend to get several calls a month from local business in the Metro Atlanta area. I haven’t really even been marketing myself to these companies nor have I been trying to get business locally. Most of my business has been done for other in different states and International Clients.

My point being I have been receiving much business from an audience that I wasn’t necessarily targeting for an array of reasons. A main one being I didn’t feel like I could compete with the local businesses search engine wise, Google mainly, so I didn’t think anybody would be able to find me. Well they did find me but not the way I thought.

There are some freelance companies that I use to bid on projects through and people tend to search on those databases and then contact me directly and they live with in a 20 mile radius. There is a lot of local business. I am trying to make my site more findable to local companies in Marietta Georgia or in Metro Atlanta area so that I might get more local business seeing that I have been getting a lot of it lately.

One thing to take away would be. market locally, and globally… Remember David and Goliath, it’s not about your competition it’s who you trust.

5 things you can do today to make your site a little bit more findable
(You could probably knock this out in a day or two)
1. Write your content then go back through and make sure you included key words in the content and headings that you know people would search for that are relevant. (just sprinkle them through out don’t pour them on… you can get penalized)
2. Use Key words and relevant text in the ‘title’ tag of the page, in your meta data ‘key words’ and ‘description’, and in your markup your ‘title’ and ‘alt’ attributes.
3. Create a Google XML Sitemap and submit it to google through webmaster tools… and Verify your website while your at it.
4. Submit your site to Yellow pages type sites, directories
5. Submit your site to other search engines mainly yahoo and msn.

There are a lot more in depth things you could do but at least you now have your foot in the door and are more findable.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.