Search Engine Optimisation - The Basics

Delivering more relevant customers to your website = increased enquiries and sales

Compare your website presence with your competitors. Competitor analysis will give you valuable insight to the marketing strategies used by your competitors. It will tell you the keywords that they hold a ranking for in Google. Yahoo and Bing. It was also tell you their position for that term in each of the engines. If you know what they are up to, it will help you formulate your own strategies.

Improve your natural listing on the major search engine networks. Good search engine ranking will give you the first page visibility that you need. If your site cannot be found on these search engines, you are losing business and income. If your site does not have a high search engine ranking nobody will find you or your business unless you pay for sponsored links or pay-per-click campaigns.

Maximise your visibility using sponsored links. Correct management of a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign can streategically attract the visitors you want using terms that work. Online advertising helps you reach your target markets, promote your brands and make sales.

Ensure your website can be detected, read and indexed. SEO success is largely dependent upon choosing the right keywords an some good old fashioned common sense. Your aim is to get your website listed where you want it to be, so that you get the visitors that you need. Intelligent keyword choices, well written souce code and relevant content presented clearly to both the user and search engines alike will achieve good, long-term results.

It isn't just your website that you need to optimise - your videos and YouTube channel(s) can also get your business noticed and generate enquiries, traffic and sales. When thinking about optimising your videos and YouTube channel, make sure you use the same keywords, phrases and tags as you are using on your website to achieve consistent results. This also makes the job of reporting a whole lot easier as you aren't having to create two sets of reports!

Your goal should always be to use and optimise for keywords that are relevant to your industry. Keep checking these keywords on a regular basis and replace them with any new ones that you have noticed that people are searching for.

Try to avoid using misleading keywords to generate traffic. While using popular terms might well drive traffic to your website, it won't necessarily drive targeted traffic and after all, nobody likes being misled. Ten visits from genuine prospective customers is of far more value than 100 visitors who immediately leave your site when finding out it isn't what they expected!