SLK Services

One of the major selling points you always hear in most MLM Business Opportunity pitches is the fact they will set you up with your own full functioning, branded web site for free. It sounds like a great benefit, especially if you don’t know the first thing about hosting, building a website, adding content, etc…, but what they don’t tell you maybe making you invisible to potential prospects interested in your business.

When I say invisible, what do I mean? Invisible to the search engines, most importantly, Google. Google is important, because most people that are searching for information online, start at the Google search page and type in what they are looking for. It is important to understand some basics about how Google scours the internet and returns results, meaning finding the websites, articles, videos, pages they believe are relevant content to what the searcher has requested.

This is not an article about the Google algorithm or how their spiders index pages, if you want to understand more about that, type a search in Google; what I will tell you is what you probably know from your own experience. When you type in a search, you are more interested and likely to click on the link of the first few results on the first page above the fold.

Those sites that rank high, meaning they come back in those first results on the first page of Google, are going to get most of the traffic, or visitors to their site. The more visitors, the more likely you are to make sales.

The problem with your replicated MLM Business Opportunity website, is it is an exact duplicate of every other website used by a person within your same company. And Google doesn’t like duplicate content. In fact, they don’t like it so much that they often don’t index…or make your site visible…to anyone who could be searching for the product or service your company is offering. You are in fact…invisible to people who may want to give you money.

You also have very little control over what you can do with the replicated site. You may be able to customize the profile, add your personal photo, some biographical data and even change some of the banner advertising or rearrange the position of some elements, etc…but you won’t be able to make a significant number of changes to keep your site from looking identical to the 1000 other sites in your organization to Google’s search spiders.

So what is the solution?

You must create your own, unique website, fill it with original, relevant content, so Google will value what you have to offer enough to return your website as a result in a search query. And don’t worry, you don’t have to be a programmer or web designer to create a website these days. In fact, staking your claim to some internet property has never been simpler.

I personally recommend you go with a blog for your personalized site. The reasons are two-fold; blogs are free to low cost and super simple to set up; and the search engines will typically rank blogs higher than static web sites, content and search engine optimization factors being equal.

If you want to go the free route, you can use a service like www.blogger.com (owned by Google) and set up your blog with a few points and clicks of your mouse. Just make sure you are very targeted with the content your posts on this blog, using specific key words (your business opportunity name or flagship products) so your blog posts will have a chance of being picked up by the search engines if people are searching for your company or products.

If you have a few dollars to invest, you can purchase a domain for under $10.00 for a year, get a hosting service for about $ 7.00 a month, set up a free WordPress Blog and even spice it up with a free theme. The advantage of hosting your own blog, is that you have complete control over the domain name, configuration and settings and the overall appearance of the site. A highly targeted, keyword rich domain name can do a lot to get you higher ranking on the search engine results pages. You still need to follow the same guidelines of being very targeted with your content, so that what you post would be relevant to search queries.

I am not trying to oversimplify things, because volumes have been written about keyword research, search engine optimization, latent semantic indexing…I can imagine your eyes glazing over now.

The key takeaway here is to use the company replicated site sparingly, as more of an information resource and to quickly set up your own unique blog and begin branding yourself and gaining visibility online.