Most people think of making a website and driving traffic to it and making a million bucks! Sounds like a good plan. Who wouldn't want to do that? The reality is that while possible it's not very probable in today's market UNLESS you start thinking like a search engine and a searcher!
One thing I always try to hammer into the heads of website owners is that the search engines don't rank websites. That may come as a complete surprise but it's true nonetheless. No,what they rank are web pages. That may sound like the same thing but think about it a minute and you might note the difference. Let's say you own an Austin moving company and you move commercial accounts from one office to another and you move homeowner's belongings and you move apartment tenants. If you attacked the search engines with one page that has all three areas of your business on the same page,you just watered down your pages relevance to any one of those three type customers that are looking for your service. The search engines are going to say,"Well this guy does that but this page is about other things too (not just "office movers") so we'll serve up pages that are more specific to the search term this searcher entered." There you have it! A page that had what the searcher was looking for but it didn't get served up!
Making pages on your website that are for each area of your business gives you the equivalent of having multiple websites that are optimized for keyword phrases that are different from the ones used on your main page,but still highly relevant to your business. For example,a home remodeler might optimize the main page for "home remodeler" and then have another page to attract people who are searching on related terms like "kitchen remodeling" or "sun room additions." You can use this strategy to expand your visibility beyond just a few keyword phrases. In fact,it's like having a whole network of search engine optimized sites working to capture relevant search traffic and it's all on your own website!
You can do the same thing by making mini sites using keyworded domain names as a little mini net for your business. To make it even easier,just make a subdomain on your website with the desired keyword as the name of the subdomain (subdirectory) on your website.
This isn't hard to do,you just have to burn into your brain that the search engines never rank "websites," they only rank web pages! So literally,every page of your website is important and should be thought out before it is made as to what key phrase you are targeting.
