The key to the success of any website is having it listed with the search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN's search engines are among the tools that your potential customers are using to find products and services on the Internet. If your website does not rate among the top of the results when a customer performs a search then it is unlikely to be visited as frequently as it could be and you will be losing valuable sales opportunities. It goes without saying that a customer who visits a web site as a result of a search is in the market to buy that particular product and service and you want it to be from your website.

Research has shown that consumers who find a product or service using a search engine are 5 times more likely to make a purchase than if they had found your site by any other means, such as advertising links from another site.

So, how can you ensure that your website ranks higher than your competitors in the search engines? The answer to this is simple – you need to have an effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.

These days, competition is so fierce amongst internet businesses that simply having a great product or service alone is not enough to ensure your success. If you want your business to flourish then your site must be listed among the top results that a potential customer receives when they perform a search for the particular product or service that you offer. Put quite simply, your position in the search results from the major search engines, such as Yahoo, Google and MSN, can be the difference between profit and loss or success and failure.

The goal of your SEO strategy should be to increase the ranking of your website amongst the search engines and, more importantly, to help drive more customers to your business.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the technique of doing everything possible to positively affect the ranking of your website pages in search engines results. There are numerous options as to which methods you can employ depending on the type of website that you have. No matter what your SEO strategy is, the end result is always the same – to attract more customers and increased sales via the search engines!

Every search engine employs a method, known as spiders, which hunt out relevant web pages when a person performs a search and return the results that they ‘find'. It is these spiders that you need to attract to your web site by incorporating SEO techniques.

There are literally thousands of search engines available for people to find products and services and the more of these that you submit your site to, the more customers you will get to your website, or so you would think. In reality, if a person performs a search using one of these engines they are likely to obtain the same set of results as they would from another. Why is this? One reason is obviously that the sponsored sites have paid to be listed first and this fee can be high depending on the competition for a particular keyword. However, the main reason for the same results appearing across multiple search engines is down to the Search engine Optimization techniques that the top ranking sites have employed.

There are a number of different areas that need to be targeted to help improve the SEO of your website and, at this guide provides a brief overview of each. Some of these you may be familiar with and others may be new.

The most common areas that are essential for the SEO of your site are:

• Website Title
• Content
• Meta Tags
• Description of all pages
• Primary Keywords and Keyword Phrases
• Keyword Density
• Inbound Links
• Outbound Links

It goes without saying that the content of your website is extremely important for your website to rank highly with the search engines. No matter what your website is about, there is always an opportunity to have detailed and informative copy which will grab the attention of the search engines. The higher the quality of your copy is will also attract other sites that want to place links to your site from theirs. This exchange of links obviously increases the number of visitors that you have to your site too! The more links that you can have to your site then the higher your search engine ranking will be. In fact links are the single biggest factor in determining which sites are indexed by Google, as they find most pages when their search spiders scuttle around the web and jump from page to page via hyperlinks.

Even if you have a largely retail oriented site you can still have interesting copy that the search engines love.

There are numerous techniques that can be employed as part of the Search Engine Optimization strategy of your website. It is important to incorporate as many of these as possible to increase the search engine ranking of your site. You should ensure that any code used to create your web pages is as clean as possible and not overcomplicated. Search engines can also read the file names that are used to create your website so it is important to incorporate as many appropriate keywords as possible into these file names.

You may also be familiar with the term ‘Metatags' associated with a successful SEO strategy. These are not usually seen by visitors to your website but are read by search engines. Think of them as invisible labels or descriptions relevant to the content of your site. These are now more often keyword dense and written simply to help improve search engine rankings.

As with everything associated with the World Wide Web, the technology is constantly developing and so too are the search engines. It is important to keep to keep abreast of current advancements in the search engine world and be able to adjust your SEO strategy to keep your website on top of the search engine results. It is not enough to simply employ fantastic SEO practices at the implementation stage of your website and then leave it to fend for itself. You need to keep tweaking and changing various aspects of your website to maintain the success of your SEO practices. Make regular checks to see if your website is maintaining its place among the top of the search engine rankings – if not, make the appropriate changes to ensure that it gets back to where it should be – on TOP!

Remember:
High Search Engine Ranking = Increased Traffic = MORE PROFIT!