Make Sure Your Website Shows Up Where Your Audience is Searching

How search engine optimization works to help alpaca websites gain visibility online.

It's not enough to simply have a great website. You need to make sure it will show up online, too.

If you type the search term "alpacas" in Yahoo! or Google, you can see that nearly 2 million results appear. From your own experience searching online, you know that few searchers are willing to click beyond the first one or two pages…

Search engine optimization helps alpaca websites achieve greater exposure online, making it possible for your website to rank high in search engine results.

While the keyword “alpacas” may be too competitive a term to aim for ranking when you first start out, ranking high for terms like “alpacas for sale” can be extremely lucrative for alpaca ranchers. Many enlist the assistance of a search engine optimization company to achieve their ranking goals on an ongoing basis.

Why is it so important to incorporate SEO when you’re building your alpaca website?

Stone Reuning, president of SEO Advantage, a search engine optimization and web design company specializing in alpaca farm websites, puts it this way, “Ranking well in the search engines is one of the most important factors to consider when you’re building your alpaca farm website. It’s like occupying prime retail space in a high-traffic location, and it contributes a higher return on investment than any other component of your website.”

He goes on to say, “All too often, we see alpaca owners who have paid thousands of dollars for a nice website, but it can’t be found online. When this happens, there are often structural issues the design firm didn’t consider preventing the site from being indexed properly by the search engines. And it ends up costing you double the price to fix them. It’s like building your store in a poor location and then having to rebuild it in the better spot later.”

What’s involved in search engine optimization?

SEO is a complex, constantly evolving discipline. The industry is plagued with misinformation available on the Internet, which can make it nearly impossible to do yourself, unless you are prepared to spend months, even years, studying forums and testing different methods.

Unfortunately, even well-intentioned web designers often hold misconceptions of tactics that yield SEO results. Only after significant experience are SEO firms able to provide services with reliable results - and even then there are rarely any guarantees.

Generally, SEO is achieved through attention to several elements of a website, primarily the following.

• Keywords: These are the terms people are using in the search engines, and they form the basis of your optimization. The keywords you choose to target will largely determine who finds your alpaca website.

• Tags: Different types of tags exist throughout a website in the source code like labels that show, for example, the title and description of a page. Unless you look at the code you will not see the tags but certain ones are important to search engines.

• Content: The amount of relevant content on your website helps a search engine determine how high to rank your alpaca website. All else equal, a website with 30 pages of alpaca related content will perform better than one with 10 pages, for example.

• Site architecture: The programs used to create your website and the structure of pages can affect how well it performs. For example, search engines can’t read Flash or content in frames. There are many structural factors that can hinder your rankings.

• Linking: Major search engines evaluate the number and source of inbound links to a website to help determine how to rank it. If many established websites are linking to yours, it’s an indication that your alpaca website is an authoritative source of information and hence worthy of a higher ranking.

• Monitoring performance: It’s necessary to keep an eye on movements in the search engines, as there is constant shuffling. Sometimes search engines change how they evaluate their ranking results, and your audience’s search terms can also change over time, especially as an industry grows. Also, the influx of new alpaca web sites and increased reliance on SEO all works to make it harder for your alpaca site to maintain high rankings over time without professional SEO assistance.

In short, it’s an exciting endeavor to hang out your shingle on the Internet. Alpaca owners who want to grow their alpaca business will want to work with a reputable search engine optimization company to build their websites and ensure they are properly optimized on an ongoing basis.

SEO is the key to making your alpaca farm’s web site work for you, building it into an asset that will contribute to your bottom line and a sales tool that allows you to reach thousands of potential customers effectively.

Secure your prime location online today.

 

Copyright 2006 SEO Advantage™

About the author: Lisa Banks is marketing director and senior alpaca copywriter at SEO Advantage, a web design and SEO firm serving the Ideal Alpaca Community with SEO Alpaca services since 2000. Learn more about custom alpaca website design and search engine optimization today at www.seoalpaca.com.