The yellow pages and phone books are no longer the main way consumers locate businesses. With computers, laptops, netbooks, mobile phones, and other web ready tools, the Internet has now replaced the yellow pages and most consumers now turn to the search engines to find what they need.

Consumers aren’t just searching for broad terms either. Consumers are searching for local businesses and resources just as much as global businesses.

When your target market searches for your business online, do you show up on the first page of the search engine results? If not, you really should invest in a website upgrade and work with a marketing savvy web designer who not only understands how to visually present your information, but how to market your products and services as well.

You need to show up when someone searches for you online because your target market can’t buy from you if they don’t know you exist!

At minimum, you need to have a simple, clean, well designed website with good, informative, helpful content. This will ensure that at least you have a professional presence when someone searches for you.

What I recommend, is consistently adding new and fresh content to your website. Some people through a blog update their site every day. Some once or twice a week. Some business owners only update their site once a month. Obviously the more you update the content the better, but even one update is better than zero updates.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree?

The two most important things to help you get found more often online and stand out from the rest of the sites in your niche are, in this order:

1. Good content
2. Good design

Good content that is user focused, information rich and valuable is the most important part of your website. Good content that is updated regularly is even more important.

The search engines first and foremost want to see that you are providing information of value on a regular basis. Consistently adding new content to your website shows the search engines that your site deserves to show up in the results because people need access to your newly updated content.

Good design that is user focused, easy to navigate, and clean is the second most important part of your website. Good design shows the search engines that you care about your visitors and that you want to make their experience on your site easy, useful, and enjoyable. Good design keeps the code clean and simple, places the main content no more than 2-3 clicks from the home page, and portrays a visual design that helps guide the visitor through the site.

With that said, here are a few tips to optimize your website content pages:

• Make sure keywords appropriate to the page are in your title tag.
• A short description (160 characters or less) of the page contents should be included in the meta description tag.
• Your page headlines and sub headlines should be placed inside header tags.
• Your page keywords and long-tail key phrases should be included in the meta keywords tag.
• Integrate your keywords and key phrases into your content, especially at the top of your page. But make sure it is a natural integration into the flow of your content.

So, when developing your website, first focus first on smart, fresh content and great design. Second, focus on optimizing the content, image and links. Then, once your site is completely dialed in, focus on building massive amounts of traffic to your site.

Do you agree with my top two things every website needs? Let me know