Creatives Corner

Net Nurture - Search Engine Optimisation Top Tips

Updated. 21.July.2010

Owners of small businesses are keen to have their own website and so they should be. Many will make this a priority, spending a substantial amount of what is often a restricted budget on it.
However, many are guilty of failing to consider the next step – marketing their website.

Your website might be the best-looking and easiest-to-use in your industry, but if nobody knows it’s out there, it will not add value to your business. Some people deliberately choose to attract clients
to their site through traditional marketing methods such as direct mail. For them, being on the first page of search-engine results for their chosen key word or phrase is not an aim. However, for many others a search-engine page-one ranking is not only desirable, but key to business growth.

Getting a position on the first page will not happen by chance, although many owners of small businesses assume their details will “automatically” appear on page one. Effective website marketing, which is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), takes time, ‘know-how’ and probably a budget.

In some ways SEO is not for the naive because it can be a black art. Many companies offer to give you that coveted page-one ranking for a monthly fee, which can range from a few pounds to several hundred.

A potential problem with some of these companies, though, is that they use banned “black hat” techniques, which might give you a short-term gain but could ultimately see your website excluded permanently from all searches. If this happens then you will be forced to start again with a new domain name, so be careful.

So where do you start? The truthful answer is that although SEO can be a bit daunting to the non-technical, many of the tricks of the trade are quite simple to master and can have an immediate impact on your search-engine ranking.

Here are 5 ‘top tips’:

1 Choose a reputable company to build your website, and make sure they build it using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Dynamic html (XHTML), rather than traditional html, which many off-the-shelf
software packages will use. Cutting costs or taking a short cut here could cost you more in the long run.

2 Spend a little more on your website to ensure you can make at least simple updates yourself through a Content Management System.
The search engines like to see fresh content and you don’t want to have to pay somebody to make changes for you.

3 Budget either time or money for SEO once your website is built.

4 Consider your key words and phrases when writing your website copy.

5 Consider and perhaps budget for Pay-Per-Click advertising to help drive traffic to your website immediately, while waiting for your SEO campaign to take effect.

For more information about the contents of this article, portfolio samples, website design and SEO quotes... please email: fraser@netnurture.co.uk