If you own a small business and have a website, you will undoubtedly know by now of search engine optimisation, or SEO as it is known for short. Even if you don’t fully understand it, you will be aware of the effect it can have on your business, and the potential leads (and sales) it can generate.

Search engine optimisation involves making your site more appealing to Google and the other engines, so that you rank higher in the search results for phrases that are relevant to your business. The information on your site plays a big part in this. The way your layout is structured, the words you use in the title, on links, on the content of your pages, all influence your rankings to some degree. This is known as on-page optimisation.

If you sell computers and your title says ‘Welcome to my home page’, how is Google meant to know what you’re website is about? You need to ensure your title (and rest of the website) uses phrases that relate to your business. You also need to use phrases that people are actually searching for. That’s where Google can help.

Google has an application known as the Keyword Research Tool, which lets you type in certain words and it will generate a list of related phrases, along with the amount of monthly searches each phrase gets, both locally and worldwide. For any business looking to increase their web presence, this is definitely worth doing. Find phrases that are relevant to your business and that get high levels of search volumes each month and you are well on you’re way. A title such as ‘Cheap Computers Sydney, Discount Laptops NSW’ sounds a lot better to the web surfer and is a lot more relevant to Google when it comes to indexing your site.

As well as on-page optimisation, which tells Google what you’re about, you also need to implement off-page optimisation. This basically comes down to what links are pointing to your website. Links can come from a variety of sources including blogs, business directories, articles, social network pages and other websites, and each one pointing to your site is seen as a ‘vote’ of confidence towards you. This is also known as ‘link popularity’ and is the strongest factor in influencing your rankings on the search engines.

But like most facets of life, quality is much more important than quantity. Having a few strong links from trusted sites with a similar theme to yours pass on a lot more benefit than having hundreds of links from random sites that have nothing to do with your topic. So be selective in the links you acquire. Off-page SEO can be done by yourself, or by an SEO company, or both. Effective search engine optimisation by a professional company is not cheap, as it is an ongoing process that requires a lot different techniques.

For this reason a large number of small businesses do not take up an SEO campaign, as it doesn’t fit in their marketing budget. But don’t fear, Google can help again. Signing up to a Google Places page will help you show up in the ‘local’ listings for particular phrases. Even if you can’t afford to pay for SEO, a free Places page with Google will give your site additional exposure in their listings. You may also look to do your own link building, by submitting your site to free directories, and getting any friends, colleagues or associates with a website to add you link. Good luck!

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Elliot Dean provides information on SEO strategies to help his clients and web design business.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

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