What I learned about myself today: I don’t have the ability to write a blog while watching the Office.

It’s hard to believe that it’s only been about 50 days since CoalCreative.com officially launched. Hard to believe because of how quickly our website has started crawling up Search Engine rankings.

“Target, Market and Drive” is a concept that all website owners should make themselves familiar with. In this blog, I hope to shed some light on the thought process that goes into optimizing your website for search.

1. Target: What phrases do you think people will most search for to find your business? What keywords is your competition targeting? Learn from what is working for them! Do you have a specific location you’d like to work within?

My initial target when starting CoalCreative was small businesses in NEPA that need websites. From here, I decided to do a few Google searches to see who ranks where when searching specific keywords. “nepa web design”, “nepa website design”, “web designers in wilkes-barre”, “web design scranton, pa” – these all seemed to me like keywords other businesses were optimizing their website towards.

2. Market: Now that you have an idea of what keywords you want to target, you need to gear your website towards them. Post relevant keywords in your title bar and header, add in keyword rich content that reflects your keywords.

3. Drive and don’t stop: Within a few weeks, you may notice that you’re starting to show results on the third or fourth page of Google for your specific keywords. That’s how it started for me anyways. I was really focused on bringing CoalCreative to the first page for “nepa web design”. After a few weeks, the position stayed the same.

This is where that “drive and don’t stop” comes in. You can’t just make a website and never update it. There’s a need to keep posting relevant content. Make a blog, update your site when you have a new client or project going on. This way Google sees that your site is constantly being updated and looks at your website as a must stop. If you notice that some keywords are still not converting, maybe your content isn’t rich enough so you might want to go back in and edit some things.

Just remember: It will take time so don’t give up! I know I’m glad I didn’t.