Your business can’t exist without a professional website, which costs thousands of dollars. It’s en expensive but necessary investment, but all of that money will go to waste if search engines like Google and Yahoo ignore your website.

Think about how you find a new website. Unless you hear about it from a friend or colleague, you probably find it by searching for a related term. According to eBizMBA.com, Google has 1.1 billion unique monthly visitors. Yahoo, Bing, and Ask each have more than 100 million unique monthly visitors, and while only a small percentage of those users will search for terms related to your business, you can’t afford to let them slip through your fingers. Even if your website only attracts one out of every million Internet users per month, you’ll increase the number of customers checking out your business by about 30,000 every year.

Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula that will help your search engine rankings improve, but you could end up on Google’s blacklist if your website does any of the following:

• Copies content from other websites.
• Is filled with low-quality articles or spam.
• Contains malware or other security threats.

As soon as you’re on Google’s blacklist, your website won’t show up in search results, and your traffic will slow to a crawl. If your website already contains high quality content, hire a professional web development company to inspect your code for malware and other problems. Next, submit your website to Google for review. Once Google verifies that your website is clean, your traffic will return to pre-blacklist levels within a few months.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this process please feel free to contact me.