A St. Pete Storage facility could have more customers coming to their real-world brick-and-mortar location if they opened an online location as well. Every business, no matter what they sell or what they have to offer needs an online Internet presence in order to bring more customers to their street side location. And a website should do more than announce the hours of operation and give direction along with the phone number and fax number. A website should offer something that customers could not get anywhere else, like free information about self storage in the form of a keyword rich article.

Keywords or keyword phrases are the words potential customers use in the search boxes on the major search engines in order to find what they need or want. The three major search engines – Yahoo!, Google and MSN – send out “feelers” in order to find these keywords or keyword phrases and then rank the website according to a special formula. This is known as search engine optimization or SEO and is a free and automatic service to all websites on the Internet. This seems like good news for a storage facility and while it may be, one has to remember that all websites are ranked according to this special formula and that means the competition as well. So everyone is vying for a top spot on the search engine webpages because the majority of people who use the search engine webpages usually make their choice of website from the first three to five website recommendations listed.

Another good thing about search engine optimization is that it is always working no matter where a keyword rich article is placed on the Internet, therefore, if a St. Pete Storage company were to engage in an article exchange with another website, and then both websites would increase their rankings on the search engine webpages in addition to gaining more customers. An article exchange could be performed with a relevant company or one that has nothing to do with self storage facilities. For example an article exchange could be done between a storage facility and a Tampa catering company that might rent a storage space for their extra, seasonal items such as holiday decorations. The keyword rich article could be written about how much space they receive for little money and then it would be featured on the storage spaces website. The storage unit’s website could write an article about nearly the same thing – how much space each unit offers, to be carried on the catering companies website.

Potential customers will visit one website and read an article about another website and hopefully click on the link at the bottom of the article that will take them to the website for more information on what the article is discussing. An article exchange is better than a link exchange because more information is exchanged and available for customers and the likelihood of them clicking on a link within an article are higher than a customer clinking on a lone link.