Manatee Chamber Works on Website Marketing

The Manatee Chamber of Commerce has always enjoyed a high search engine ranking throughout the Internet. However, as time passes more sites are developed and additional companies begin to pay for top position. Website optimization is becoming more and more important.

Website optimization is the act of making ones website content more search engine friendly, resulting in higher rankings. There are many different schools of thought on how to get higher rankings on search engines and we're going to share a few options that will hopefully help you, our members, get the placement you deserve for the keywords (search terms) that most fit your business.

What are Keywords? When you visit a search engine and enter what you're looking for, those are keywords. Search terms. If you type, "Bradenton Business" then that engine will comb the Internet looking for sites that use those two keywords.

Title
Open your website and look at the top left portion of the screen. There's a blue bar there with your page title on it. This page title should contain more than just your company name. By placing keywords in this title, you're telling the search engines what is most important about your business. If you look at www.ManateeChamber.com, you'll see that each page utilizes different keywords in the title to cover as many topics as possible.

Text
Many search engines look at the first paragraph on your site and select your keywords from that. Therefore, it's important that you use your keywords in introductory information.

Updates
Search engines know when a site has been updated. The more you add to and change your site, the more current the engines will consider your information. The more current they consider you to be, the higher they'll place your link on their site.

Reciprocal Links
Sites that link to you, and contain information relative to your product or service, will increase your rankings. For instance, if you're a realtor and have links from mortgage companies, banks, the homebuilder's association, etc. then the search engines will recognize that these sites consider your information to be important. If you've provided the Manatee Chamber with your website information, we are linking to you through our Preferred Business Directory.

All of these items are important to help your site gain status with the search engines. Higher results on Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc. mean more visitors to your site and hopefully more sales. More visitors to your site means the search engines will consider your data relevant and will rank you higher. It's a great circle if you can get in it.

Interested in linking your site to the Manatee Chamber? Below, you'll find a copy of this year's cyberplaque. The cyberplaque is an online version of your membership decal and can be placed on your site with a link back to ours. It's a great way to show the online world your involvement in the local community. To download the graphic for use on your site, right click the picture and choose "save as". The graphic is now ready to send to your webmaster and / or place on your site.