Are you struggling to attract clients?

Many small business owners mistakenly assume that once they have a web site, clients will appear on their virtual doorstep. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen unless you make your website findable by optimizing it for the search engines.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is simply designing your website in a way that makes it possible for people to find it when they search online. It’s the process of modifying your web site so that the search engines rank your site more highly and send you more visitors.

Even if you don’t design your own website, you need to know enough about what you’re paying someone to do to know whether or not they’re doing a good job.

Most web designers don’t know much about SEO. If you don’t plan on hiring an SEO expert, you need to make sure you know enough about SEO to be able to give your web designer clear instructions about what you want them to include where.

Even the most awesome website is no good if nobody can find it

If you write your website pages around keywords that people aren’t actually using to search for what you have to offer, you won’t have many visitors. Your keywords are the foundation of your marketing strategy. Take time to choose them carefully, if you don’t, the right people may never get the opportunity to find your site.

The first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and keyword phrases. You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t done keyword research, you may be WRONG.

Getting started with SEO can seem a bit daunting but it doesn’t have to be, you just need the right information from someone who speaks your language. SEO is actually very straight forward; anyone can learn how to optimize their website for the search engines. Yes, really!

SEO isn’t the only key to your success, but it is a must do if you want potential clients to find your website and make your website work for you. Small business owners need to use every tool and strategy available to ensure their success. I can think of nothing more vital, more accessible and more easily implemented than SEO. A site that effectively targets your ideal clients and makes it to the first page of search results will bring you all the potential clients you need.

If you have a website, be smart enough get to know and implement simple SEO strategies, start climbing your way out of the search engine doldrums and turn your website into an effective marketing tool. It will be time well spent.

Click here, for the keys to more search engine traffic.

5 Keys To Getting Your Website Found

If you want to get more visitors to your web site and you don’t want to pay for advertsing, you need to optimize your website for the search engines. It’s much easier than you think.

When you follow simple tried and tested strategies you will start to climb in search engine rankings and you will get more visitors to your website.

Once your web site is ranked on the first pages of search results you will get much more search engine traffic. The time invested in search engine optimization is well worth it.

Here are five keys to get you started with search engine optimization or SEO

1) One of the first steps to SEO is to brainstorm and research the keywords potential visitors use to find what you have to offer. You can’t afford to guess the keyword phrases that your visitors will use to search. If you build your pages around keywords that your potential visitors don’t actually use, you will wallow in the search engine doldrums and remain invisible to your target market.

2) Once you know the keywords your target market use to search, write your pages around those keywords and make sure that you include your keywords in all the right places.

• the file name
• title tag
• description
• keyword tag
• headings
• throughout the text
• in anchor text
• in image tags

3) Another very important aspect of search engine optimization is links. You need a good linking structure within your site. Make sure you link your pages to each other with anchor text (a clickable link using your keywords)

4) You also need links from other websites, the more links you have, the better. Do make sure that the links pointing to your site are from relevant sites and try to make sure that you have links that use your keywords in anchor text.

5) Make sure that once your visitor lands on your site that they have good reason to stay. You need good quality information, attractively laid out with lots of white space. Look at your site through the eyes of a visitor and make sure that it is user friendly or they will just click away.

If you want to rank well in the search engines so that you can have more than your share of free traffic, I invite you to check out Optimize Your Website

Optimize Your Website is a clear step by guide to Search Engine Optimization written for non techies. It simplifies the process and gives you links to all the tools you need.

Click here and start optimizing your website today.

Search engines constantly change their algorithms, shuffle their indexes, merge results and share content. The only consistent thing about marketing your website to them is that what works really well today probably won’t work so well tomorrow.

That’s why you need an experienced search marketing professional who keeps two fingers on the pulse of the major search engines. If Google hiccups, we know about it. If Yahoo! gets stubborn, we’ll coax those rankings back to the first page.

Working with search engines is a long-term, high maintenance relationship and we’re dedicated to managing that relationship so you don’t have to, and at an investment you can feel good about.

So How Exactly Does SEO Work?

This is the million dollar question. And we can almost guarantee you that for every person you ask, you’ll get a different answer. That’s because marketing to the search engines is like any creative endeavor: cooking, painting, carpentry, etc.

If you ask five people to bake a cake, you’ll get five unique cakes each with different ingredients. Ask ten people to craft you a chair and you’ll get ten distinct pieces each with its own style.

Because the search engines change their ranking algorithms (the equations they use to analyze a website’s reputation and rankability) so often, and they each use such widely varying criteria, there are literally hundreds of ways to promote your site to the first page of search results.

However, there are certain universal guidelines regarding what central principles and elements are vital to your search marketing strategy. There are also very clear rules against certain practices that attempt to cheat or trick the search engines.

Fundamental Principles for Successful SEO

1. Content

Content will always be your key ticket to top rankings. Without it, any rankings achieved will be short-lived. For content to help your ranking, however, you need a lot of it and it has to be updated regularly. Most importantly, each page of content must target a specific keyword term.

However, if your site possesses content that is auto-generated or is poorly written, i.e. a human visitor would not find it useful and informative, the search engines will figure it out and demote your site, possibly even blacklisting you and preventing you from showing up in their results at all.

We develop well-written, keyword targeted content for your site that is updated consistently and monitored for rankability. Your business will enjoy the added benefit of an ever-growing resource library of information that your site visitors will enjoy and which will also help with your sales conversions.

2. Links

More specifically, one-way links from authoritative sites in your niche market. You can find out how authoritative a site is by looking at its Page Rank.

Page Rank, or PR, is a ranking system Google devised to show how much weight or authority a particular site has. No one can say the exact methodology Google uses to assign Page Rank, however all SEO experts agree that it largely has to do with the amount of incoming links a site has, how long it’s been around, and visitor activity on the site (yes Google even knows how long someone remains on your site after they click through from the search results!).

What this means for you is that you want as many high PR sites linking into your site as possible (without you linking back to them). This is because Google gives these sites a lot of respect and values their “recommendations” signaled by who they choose to link to.

If all this sounds a bit complicated, think of it this way:

Google and the major search engines analyze your website the way scholars judge academic papers. The more journals and other reputable papers cite your research and quote you, the more authoritative and “expert” you become.

We negotiate inbound links on your behalf, concentrating on links from sites related to your market whose reputation thematically relates to the reputation you’re trying to build. We also make sure these links deep-link into your website, meaning that they link to various pages in your website, rather than just to your homepage (also a sign that you’re highly authoritative).

3. Visitor Behavior

Google knows everything. Other Search Engines like Yahoo! and MSN aren’t so far behind. If a visitor clicks from their search engine into your site, and leaves immediately, Google knows that they didn’t find what they were looking for. If too many people do this, Google will drop you from their rankings because they assume you’re not relevant for that particular term. This is why site design, compelling content, and conversion analysis are important.

We offer Website Conversion Optimization in addition to SEO to help you address this particular issue.

4. Human Idiosyncracies

Google wants to know that a human is running the show. Automated SEO software, or any techniques that add hundreds of pages to your site within a week, or which create content automatically, are a dead giveaway that you’re doing something Google doesn’t like.

This won’t just get you knocked off the top 10 rankings – Google and other search engines will ban your site from ever showing up in their results – even when someone searches your exact domain name. This is why any illegal or unethical techniques will kill your business.

We hand craft every single page of information on your website and upload those pages consistently over several months.

Universally Illegal SEO Practices: Avoid at ALL Costs

Search engines may be vague about what you can do to get top rankings.
However, they are not vague about those practices that will get you banned from their rankings. For instance, Google provides Webmaster Guidelines that detail what you are NOT to do when promoting your website.

When you are looking for an SEO professional, be aware of these illegal techniques and the different “pet names” given them by dubious fly-by-night companies. We’ve provided several of them here for your easy reference. You can also download these tips in an easy-to-read PDF format.