Using Emerging Technology to Create a Web Presence
Taking advatage of Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media
Of all the places to take advantage, emerge yourself into social media. Although this can open your business up to the hecklers and the scourge of the world, its a great place to begin making a solid presence on the internet.
Create a Facebook page and update posts regularly. In doing so, you will be creating activity that internet crawlers like google will pick up on. The more active your site is, the higher your page rankings will go. There are a few issues to consider before going this route though. It's best to turn off posts directly on to your pages. You can set the page so that only posts that you accept getting posted on the page and by doing so you'll be preventing negative content from others, getting on to your page. Another thing to consider is not getting into politics. You're in a very public and social environment, political comments or negative comments can spread like wildfire, resulting in a disaster that could be hard to supress. If this should ever occur, there are ways to fix the issue, like removing the post, so don't be afraid to post anything, just don't intentionally get into politics.
If you're a professional put your information on LinkedIn. For professionals, LinkedIn can provide important contacts and, depending on whether or not you post to it, can help solidify your knowledge of your profession within the community. For your business, try and be more focused on the business information rather than a full history, noboby need to know you were washing dishes prior to becoming a lawyer.
There are others that you can join, but social media can give you recognition as long as you periodically post to the pages so that the web crawlers can document changes made.
Creating a Webpage
A web page is a very important element to any business. Who would have thought in just a short time, twenty years or so, businesses would need to switch from the simple word and mouth of it's customers to webpages? It's a new world of information and people are often looking for it. Without a website, you're alienating a good portion of your customers. Believe it or not, people often look for your website to check out your business services and learn your history. Often times they'll base their first impressions not by entering your place of business but by the information and look of your website.
To be honest, you don't even have to offer any sort of online purchases, your guests just need information about your establishment. Also, by providing a website you're also attracting new customers in the area who might have been passing by your establishment and never even noticed it was there.
When creating a website, in order to maximize your exposure be sure to pay attention to the content and meta tags within the website. There's no real magical formula for getting full exposure on the internet, but because you'll want to rank higher than other pages on Google or other search engines its better to pay close attention to the content and meta tags. Between the two, the crawlers for the search engines determine the content that would fit searches requests.