I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times: “If you’re not in Google you don’t exist.” And it’s true. If you’re not in Google you don’t exist. Actually that’s not even good enough. If you’re not in the first five pages of any search concerning your business, unless someone knows about you, good luck in being found by new customers. Now you may say this is hyperbole, but look at the facts in figure 1. Almost 70 percent of searches occur at Google. Furthermore, if you’re not well positioned in Yahoo! either, you are virtually invisible to 90% of people searching for you or your product. This is true for component suppliers or distributors.

Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers* (Figure 1)

Now, for the average person, with a personal web page, being in Yahoo! or Google should not be an obsession, but if you have a business and you’re not in Google, it should be. Remember, not being found in searches on your key words or products makes you virtually invisible to your target audience searching the internet.

So how do you fix this? There are several ways, depending on your pocket book and the speed of execution you require. Below are some sure-fire ways to increase your visibility in varying degrees.

The quickest (and fastest way) to get into Google is to pay for Google Adwords. In short, and for simplicity, Google Adwords allows you to place ads on sites related to your target market. You can also have your link on results pages when a paid Adword is searched for at google.com in a sidebar. There is no set price, you bid on the words. The higher you bid the higher you are in the Ad Side-bar. Below is an example of Google Adwords in action for a search on “EMI Filters”.

If you notice the top bar and side bar are taken by ads by companies looking to attract those people searching for EMI.

Now while Adwords is the quickest way to get your product into Google searches, there are cheaper ways as well. One of those is creating a blog on your site. The content should be relevant. Write articles introducing yourself and your company, but make sure the content is relevant and useful. Maybe talk about new product offerings and how to use the new products. Don’t afraid to be honest, and humorous. You want people to come back often and have a reason to visit and possibly to subscribe to your blog with something called a feed reader. A feed reader is the Reader’s Digest of 21st century. Once you’ve written a couple of articles, head over to Pingomatic.com, Technorati.com or blogflux.com and “ping” your blog. What a “ping” does is tell the world you’ve created a blog and updated the content. There are also ways to automate this as well, with just a simple bit of code. Quick tip: When writing a blog post use relevant titles and tags related to the topics discussed. Sounds stupid, I know, but you’d be amazed at how simple advice is ignored.

Another strategy is by the strategically placed links or reciprocal links method. But be careful, not just any link will work. You need a link from a website already in Google, but a quality site related to your company. How do you know its quality? It’s all about content. If the site has no content, just ads, you don’t want a link from that site. The easiest solution is to trade a web links with other industry sites and/or create strategic alliances with non-competing lines. For example, National Semiconductor has the Partner Pavilion with links to several suppliers with related products in passive components, FPGA’s and Development tools. The national site has high authority, and a good Google page rank of 5/10.

I should warn, though, the link strategy takes longer for you to get into Google. It’s especially a gamble if your links are not to reputable sites. So make sure you do your homework. A great indicator of that is something called “Page Rank”.” Page Rank” is scored out of ten, and you can see it in your Google Toolbar if it’s enabled. Goolge describes it best themselves:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

For now, what you need to know is that your goal is to get a link from sites with a PR (page rank) greater than 3.

Other things to consider about Google and your web-site, and thus company visibility, is using the many tools available to analyze your site, and make sure the content is easily readable by Google’s spiders. Spiders are not nasty little creatures in web speak, but robotic crawlers that all search engines have that go out an retrieve the information. The better and easier your site is to read/navigate, the higher likeliness your content will appear. Most importantly for Electronic Component companies is the ability for customers (i.e. engineers and buyers) to find part numbers. Many buyers will search with Google to identify info on a part, while many engineers will search with Google to find ways to integrate your components or search for the right part for their sockets. This is the most important thing for you to keep in mind as a manufacturer or as a distributor: A good-looking site is worth nothing if no one knows how to find you in Google.

*Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending 5/31/ 2007, 4/26/08, 5/26/2007 from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. * - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.