How well is your website performing? Are you satisfied with the amount
of customers who view your website? Do you get enough business through your
website? By reading this article you will be in a position to do something
about all three questions.
It's all very well having a nicely designed and appealing website for your
business but it's of no use if you don't get the customers to visit it. The
number one term you will find associated with this is search engine
optimisation. You will find endless sources on the Internet telling you to
optimise this and optimise that but what does it all mean?
Search engine optimisation simply means making your website as friendly to
search engines as possible. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN
provide your business with the ability to reach a huge amount of customer's,
they are by far the most successful method to boost sales for your business. If
your website is nicely optimised then you will have a greater chance of
appearing higher up on the search engines.
Most customers will type in a phrase into the search engine and view the first
couple of websites that it finds, they will usually be successful in finding
what they were looking for on the first page of results. Statistics show that
customers very rarely look further than the first page (90% don't look past the
first page) so what good is it if your website was on page 10? This is where
search engine optimisation comes in, it will give your business a greater
chance of being on that first golden page in the search engines.
There are many methods that all contribute to a higher ranking but some are
more influential than others. The first factor is having a well-built website.
This is a standard feature that all website design companies should offer.
The second method is keywords. Keywords are the words that are associated with
your business, the idea is to include these words in your website so when a
customer types in a phrase in a search engine, your website is more likely to
appear. Keywords should be chosen carefully to target the correct market for
your business. It's no good targeting the word "Fruit" if your
business sells website design.
The third factor that contributes to a high search engine ranking is back
links. This simply means a link from someone else's website to yours. The more
links you have to your website the better. Search engines view your back links
as a sign of popularity and obviously the more popular you are the more
successful you appear.
One of the best methods for this is to submit your website to online
directories, not only will you get a back link but you are also likely to get a
lot of customers coming to your website from that link. Make sure that you
select trusted directories and one's that can relate to your business, there is
a chance that you will get penalised by search engines if you sign up to link
farms (websites that collect lots of spam and poor quality links).
Finally, having a website that is constantly updated also gives you a boost in
terms of search engines as they like to see fresh content. This is also likely
to draw customers back to your website as they know they are likely to see
something new. This in turn will boost the amount of traffic you get to your
website which will also help in gaining a higher search engine rank.
These are just some of the methods in which you can improve your website
performance, there are many other factors that contribute to a high search
engine ranking. Most are an on-going process so it is very beneficial to your
business to continually try to improve your performance as there is always
someone competing against you for that top spot.