how can I get my website more hits by search engines?

[William]

i've just built a website for my barbershop, and after choosing the best key words I can emagine, it is still not appearing in the first page or even after when I search for barbers in that area. Can anyone please tell me what to do in order to make it appear in the first page in Google or other search engines
thank you

[Corey]

In order to get traffic from Google, Google must consider your site worthwhile. With the Panda updates, Google now places a heavy importance on unique content. It loves sites with content not found any other place on the web (for example, if you copy/paste text from another website, instead of write your own, Google frowns upon that). Google will push your page up in rankings according to that, and also according to links. The more websites that link to yours, the more important Google considers it. So, it's a matter of getting your website "out in the open." Then, Google will come by, notice its important and bump you up in ranking.

So besides unique content, it pretty much all comes down to link building. There's many methods to do this. For example, create a twitter account for your website. And create a Facebook page for your website. Both with links pointing to your domain. You may blog comment, and write on forums with adding your link in the signature. A great way is to write articles for article directories. For example, write something about being a barber, or something specific to that business, such a tips or suggestions, and post it to http://ezinearticles.com, with your link in the "resource box." But do not post the article that you write on your own site. This is duplicate content, and will harm your rankings. Also, do not submit the same article to different directories.

Each link has a quality associated with it. For example, if you post links on spammy websites, then Google is going to associate your site with spam. Google hates spam. You'll go to the bottom of the pit if you engage in this type of link posting regularly. If you post on high quality websites-- websites that pertain to a barbershop, hair, hair products, or whatever it may be, then Google will associate it accordingly.

But here is where things get complex. Nowadays, most sites have a "no follow" rule added to all links on that person site. What does that mean? The "no follow" rule tells Google, "ignore this link, as though it doesn't exist." This was intended to cut down on spam, as many spammers went out of hand posting links all over the web and getting high rankings. So webmasters were given an option to take matters in their own hands, and control what links Google pays attention to on their site. 98% of websites now use no-follow, and this will not help you move up in Google page ranking if you post links on these sites. So, it gets hard as you must find that 2% of which will be useful to you.

Don't get me wrong, the "no follow" links are good in certain ways. Google pays attention to them so far as giving your site authority, or using the no follow links to better figure out what your site is all about. So they are important, but they won't bump you up in page rank at all. There is a general consensus among SEO experts, one that I tend to agree with, is that you must target both do-follow and no-follow links. The reason is that nowadays Google really, really, hates spam and "cheating" to get ranking. If Google notices you only have do-follow links, that may be considered "unnatural" and perhaps manipulative to their algorithms. So targeting both creates you that "ying-yang" idea of balance. I'm not sure if this has been proven, or if it's more so a theory. But remember, any (quality) link is better than no link.

There's plugins for Firefox you can use, that will tell you which sites are do-follow, and which ones are no-follow.

You may be tempted, as many are, to say "screw it," and purchase a bunch of backlinks. Be very cautious, as anyone promising a "thousand back-links for 20 dollars" is spamming your site and this will cause harm. Quality back-links are not the easiest to find, and people providing quality services charge a lot. Even then, do your research.

I mentioned Ezinearticles for a reason. I believe they are do-follow. So if you can post a few quality articles, you'll get a few links out from a high quality site. But remember, it takes time to see results in Google. If you spread a few links around, it may be a couple weeks until Google discovers it and acts upon it.

You may want to register for Google Webmaster Tools, if you haven't already. This will provide you stats on your website, such as how many people see your link in Google, and what keywords they typed to find it.

Of course, there's a lot more to SEO. I know you're just looking for a simple, quick fix. You have a website about your shop. You just want it seen. If only it were so simple to Google. If you decide to get serious about this, you could purchase an SEO review from Fiverr for 5 bucks. This isn't really useful in and of itself, but it'll give you a good idea of what types of things you should know.

[Solely Social]

Hi,

For your local business my advice would be to drive traffic via social media such as facebook, twitter, foursquare and instagram.

As your are a barber many people will choose you on recommendation and they way to do that is to get word of mouth working for you.

There are a number of ways you can do this:

1) set up a facebook business page, then ask your friends to like it to start the interest. From there you can set up "check in" offers. So if somebody is a new customer and they "check in" on facebook they could maybe get 10% of their hair cut. The reason you want people to check in is because it shows up on their facebook page and to all of their friends. Your effectively getting free publicity via their facebook page. plus the more people that check in the more people will see and hear about your shop.

2) twitter - this is a great platform and i would set up a twitter account and begin following local businesses in your area. When they follow you back reply to them and say that the owner of that anybody from that shop now gets 10% of their hair cuts. This will be an amazing deal for them and i'm guessing they will shout about this via twitter to all their foillowers. which in turn will spread the word about your barber shop.

3) foursquare - one of the best location based apps and growing hugely in popularity. This app allows you to set up offers and prizes based on the amount of times people visit your shop and login. Lets say somebody has logged in for the first time they may get 10% off. However lets say they login 10 times and become whats known as the mayor then they earn a free hair cut.

However other people can kock them off the mayor spot if they loggin in more times than they do, this will help make sure your customer keep coming back.

4) finally make sure your new site has a blog and write a blog post around 1 per week on things that your customers will search for online such as. "At what age can i take my child for his first hair cut", "what is the lastest trends for young men" "whats the latest trends for the over 50s" ect.

each time you complete a blog post tweet these out or post them on facebook also.

5) finally - you can spend a small amount on facebook ads. this is super targeted. you can target males in your area, that are between the ages of 16-65, single, married engaged, interested in looking good etc. in terms of the budget you can spend as little at £30-£50 for the month just to get things started.

I hope that helps.