The great myth that stops many one-person business owners in their tracks is their website needs to be perfect, or at least wonderful, before they can use it to market their business.

In fact, there’s lots you can do before you have a website, or with your current website to market your business.

The next myth is that your website has to be better, perfect, finished, before it will help you market your business. The reality: almost any website is better than none at all, even a one-page site. The key word is almost.

Many people look to the web first for information about new resources, whether it be a referral from friends and colleagues, or even when they hear you speak or see an article by you. You need to be ready with a simple “website before you have a real website” with your contact information and a little about what you do and who you are.

Which brings us to the dread myth number three: I have to optimize my website so the major search engines will find me and put me on page one of the search results so everyone in my market will find me and hire me. It’s a huge myth. And, like most myths has just enough basis in fact to make it dangerous to believe the whole thing.

The reality with search engine optimization for one-person businesses? 99.44% of the time it won’t drive any strangers to beg at your door for your help. You’re just too small and have too tight a budget to afford  a mid-five figure monthly commitment to search engine optimization. It is just too expensive.

Does this mean you should just ignore search engines? Absolutely not! Ignore at your own peril. Just get real clear on why you are using them and what they can do for your one-person business. Just change your approach and your expectations.

See your website as an easily updated, increasingly comprehensive brochure, with lots of information about you, the services and products you offer, and goodies for people who stumble into it, or are purposely referred to it.

Use your website to build credibility, reassure suspects and prospects you are credible, ethical, knowledgeable, and easy to work with

How to do this? Get started by checking out what is already on your site. Since most people will be looking for you by name, first check out how “findable” you are when people search on your name.
Enter your name into the two major search engines: Google and Yahoo. Be sure to use the format “firstname lastname” with the quotation marks. For example I search on “Pat Wiklund” or “Patricia Wiklund” (Of course I get different results depending on which name I search…ahhh the joys of electrons.)

After quenching your joy, or dismay, look carefully at each listing. There are three parts visible: the linked title, a short description of what is on the page, and the url (website address) of the page that is referenced. Click through to that page to see what opens. (Or, if nothing came up, go to a page you know is on your site.) You should see the same title at the top of the browser bar that was the title of the link. (Browsers are the programs you use to see what is on the web: Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Mozilla.)

Now dig deeper by “viewing the source.” (It is an option with just about every browser, typically in the View drop down menu window.)

Don’t let all the HTML hieroglyphics put you off. Find the text that is the same as the title and the description that you saw on the Google or Yahoo listing. These are somewhere close to the top of the source code page. You may see a list of “metatags” close by, or maybe not.

If you have something in each of these areas, you are on your way to being found on the web when someone knows your name. Or is purposely looking for you. Will you come up at the top of the listing, even when they search on your name? Maybe, maybe not.

If you have a common name, you may be listed in there with all the other Mary Smith’s. The less common your name, the more likely your site will be towards the top when they search on your name. I have a pretty uncommon name here in the States. However, there is one more Pat Wiklund I know for sure, a nice man who lives in Maryland, and lots more Pat Wiklund’s who live in Sweden, where Wiklund is a very common name. Usually someone looking for me can determine which is the “real Pat Wiklund” they are looking for by the title and the description.

What to do if nothing comes up, or there are no titles, descriptions, and metatags in your source code? Run do not walk to your webmaster for a web redo. Someone has constructed your website either by using page images, rather than HTML code, or they didn’t know what to put use, and you didn’t know how important it was to have these three little helpers.

Time for a real conversation with your webmaster. It’s step one in being findable on the web.