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Since homeowners and designers are increasingly turning to the web for finding a concrete contractor, having a website for your concrete business has become a critical sales and communication tool. However, simply owning a website is by far not a guarantee for better business – in order to be successful, your site needs to be visited by potential customers, but how will they find you?

The most effective way to achieve that is by having a strong presence in the search engines, which can account for 50% to 80% of your website's traffic. Even though there are dozens of search engines around, three of them have emerged as the dominant players — Google , Yahoo and MSN. Of these, Google controls about 50% of all search engine traffic, which makes it a potentially powerful referrer for your site

So what do you have to do in order to achieve good rankings with Google? Even though there's no cast-in-stone formula, the following Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools may prove useful—as long as you combine them with a hearty dose of perseverance. Please note that we are not talking about doing pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising—which are paid listing appearing on the right-hand side of the search engine results—but about ranking organically, or naturally, in the main section of the search engine results (see Fig. A).


1. Keyword Selection

First of all, decide which keywords are important to, or that describe, your business. These are most likely the keywords with which you'll want to rank high. You might consider phrases like "decorative concrete," "concrete resurfacing," "precast concrete" or any other terms related to your business. However you have to make sure that the keywords you have selected:

1. are indeed being searched for by your potential visitors (Tip: use a site like Wordtracker to find out the daily volume of searches for a particular term)
   
   
2. are not overly competitive in the search engines (Tip: do a Google search for those terms and see what number of results is displayed in the upper right corner, see
   Fig. B)
   

The optimal keywords are those with a relatively high search volume and a low number of competing sites in Google.


2. Site Content

After you have selected your keywords, it's time to implement them throughout your site. You need to know some basic HTML in order to do that, but your webmaster will most likely be able to help you here. The best locations for implementing keywords are the page titles (which are visible in the upper bar of your web browser, see Fig. C) and page descriptions (not visible in the browser) as well the main text body of your web pages (don't worry your webmaster will know what those terms mean!). Search engines will often use page titles and descriptions (or the text body, if no descriptions are available) for displaying website listings in their search results, see Fig. D.

In addition to keywords, search engines are looking at the amount of text and the number of pages on your site—the more you have, the better. So if your website consists of only a few pages with little text on them, try to create new pages and add more content. If you're short on ideas, try adding some descriptions of the concrete projects you have crafted, your experiences working with concrete, or some testimonials and stories of your satisfied customers. If writing content is not your strength, you can consider hiring a professional to create content for your site, for example at www.thewritecontent.com. This might also come in handy if you plan to distribute content as part of a link-building campaign, see section below.


3. Link-Building

Google places high emphasis on the number and quality of links pointing to your website. Each link to your site is considered a "vote of confidence" and the more you have, the higher you will be positioned in the search results. Google has its own metric called PageRank, which measures the importance of a website based on its number of incoming links. In general, websites with higher PageRank tend to rank better in Google's search results.

PageRank is measured on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest and 0 being usually assigned to new sites and. The "older" your websites gets and the more incoming links it acquires, the more your PageRank will increase. While moving from a PageRank of 0 to 1 is not very difficult, the higher your PageRank gets, the harder it becomes to move to the next level. In order to check your website's PageRank, you can install the Google Toolbar, which works with Internet Explorer.

So in order to be competitive in Google (and the search engines, too), you will have to embark on a link-building campaign, where you actively pursue quality links from other websites. Granted, link-building done right is a slow and tedious process — but the effort is worth it, because, in addition to improving your search engine positioning, quality incoming links can also bring in more visitors to your site, which translates into better business.

The most valuable links to your site are one-way links, preferrably from websites with a PageRank higher or equal to yours. Here are two effective approaches for building quality one-way links:

1. Get listed in online directories. There are lots of either industry-related or general directories that will list your site along with a link, either for free or for a flat-rate fee. The two directories that Google values most are the Open Directory (free) and Yahoo Directory ($299/year). To find more directories, you can do a Google search for terms like "construction directory" or "concrete directory."
   
   
2. Create and distribute valuable content. You can start by creating an interesting, well-written article. If you already have quality content on your website (see section 2), you can just select a portion of it and distribute it as an article, or, again you can hire a professional to write an article for you. Then you have to search for sites to submit your article to — usually, if they publish your article, they will also add a link to your site. There are many sites dedicated to posting all kinds of articles (ex. www.ezinearticles.com) as well as industry-related sites that may publish your article if they find it valuable (e.g. www.naturalhandyman.com).

Remember that if you do a link-building campaign, you will encounter a lot of websites, which, for one reason or another, will not want to link to you. Relax, it's normal to get a low response rate. You need to stay focused and regard link-building as an ongoing effort, not a one-time project. At Cheng Concrete Exchange, we've invested over two years (and counting) on developing our site content and optimizing for SEO results—our efforts are ongoing and vast, especially as technology develops and changes so quickly.

If you have just launched your website, it will take a few months until Google will notice and credit your efforts. However, when your website starts appearing in the search engine results and your traffic numbers start increasing, you'll know it's been worthwhile — Good Luck!


Resource List

SEO book: Search Engine Optimization Fast Start >>
Tutorials, Forums and News on SEO >>