First off, you want to ask many questions of your webmaster. What exactly did they do to not only put up your site, but how did they maximize the site for search engine visibility? This is one of the key things that you should bug your webmaster about. If they get back to you that they only put up the site and do nothing else, you better shop somewhere else for putting up your website. Quiet often the webmasters know how to put up the website, but do not know the mechanics of how to optimize it for marketing purposes.

THE GREAT ASSUMPTION

One of the most common mistakes business people make when hiring a webmaster is assuming that the webmaster designs your site AND also makes it marketable to the masses who are out there surfing the web. Your second assumption is that you expected your webmaster to target who is going to see your website. Wrong. Wrong Wrong.

A very small amount of webmasters are going to tell you that they “optimized” your site with keywords and tweaked your site for attraction from the search engines. Most will not. Here’s why; a webmaster for the most part are doing their job in setting your website up.

KEYWORD SEARCH

Now to the “nitty gritty.” To get your website or blog noticed quickly, you need to insert “keywords” and “keyword phrases” that will help search engines find you and consequently help people who need your product or service. Makes sense doesn’t it?

For example, if you have an auto repair service, you need to insert the obvious words such as “automobile repairs, fix cars, repairing automobiles,” or anything that someone would use to search for your company. Note that these could be single words or phrases or even complete sentences. It is every possible way someone would enter words or sentences to get to where they want to. Search engines are aware of this and want to be of service to the person making the search inquiry so they come back again and again with all their searches. You know why? The search engine companies have put advertising on all their websites and want you to “click” on those links for their advertisements…..but in order to do that, you need to come back to their site because you had a good experience with their search results. That’s the bottom line.

So, the “planting” of keywords in your website or blog is the most important thing to give attention to. It is the lifeblood of driving traffic to your website and also to bring live customers to your business location.

If any blogger, whether business blogging or blogging for personal use is on the “up and up,” there is no reason to worry. It seems that all bloggers have an anxiety attack on this law, to take effect on December 1, 2009.

If any blogger is doing their job to legitimately promote their own product and service, there should be no problem. If any legitimate blogger is promoting another company’s product or service as an affiliate, there just needs to be public disclosure about if they are getting paid or not to promote said product and service. The second important item that is covered in the new FTC ruling is in the claims from people who are added as a testimonial of a said product or service. The results of what the product or service has done for the customer has to be fully disclosed in real outcomes. There can be no outlandish claims about “overly” praising a product or service as to lead a potential customer to be mislead.

I think that the people who are running questionable businesses will be the only ones fearing this new FTC ruling.

What is most intriguing about this ruling is, given that there are approximately over 200 million blogs in the world today, how is the United States goverment going to enforce this law? Out of the 200 million blogs that exist, Technorati “guestimates” the number of US blogs at 114 million.

To all new businesses that start a blog, especially a localy business blog, there is no need to really worry about getting the fines, or getting shut down, as long as you are operating legitimately, you have no need to worry.