Web site promotion
The Internet is a big place. How will visitors find you? Promoting and optimising your site for search engines helps attract new customers.
What is web promotion?
You want your web site to be number one in Google. Unfortunately, your competitors want the same for their sites. Web promotion (sometimes called ‘search engine optimisation’) is about getting better placement in Google and other search engines.
How can this be done?
Search engines use different methods for ranking pages, but they have many things in common. They rank pages based primarily on two criteria: relevance and popularity.
For a given search query, pages at the top of the list will be relevant to that query. If a user searches for ‘Bolton hairdresser’, pages should be about that subject. Relevance is difficult to determine electronically, but search engines often test how often search terms (called keywords) appear in the page, and where. If the keywords are in the page title, initial paragraphs, and headings, the search engine tends to assume greater relevance.
Invisible to most users, but visible to search engines, is a so-called 'meta' tag that describes the page. We'll use keywords here to explain the page and its relevance to the search term.
Pages should also be easy to navigate, not just for humans but for the 'robots' used by search engines to index the web. Well-designed, accessible sites that conform to web standards make a lot of difference.
What are the best keywords?
Choosing the right keywords to optimise for is a balancing act. It's vitally important to choose words or phrases that people actually search for, but with some, there's too much competition. Fortunately, there are excellent tools available that can help. For example, Google's AdWords can help to find some related keywords, as can Digital Point's Keyword Suggestion Tool. As well as finding alternatives, the latter tells you how often people search for them.
How can I increase my site's popularity?
If lots of other sites link to your page, the search engines interpret this as popularity. If your site is interesting, eventually people will choose to link to it, but they need to find it first. Submit it to online directories, such as Dmoz or Yahoo. Submit it to business directories, such as the UK business directory, Scoot, CountyWeb, the UK Small Business Directory, Top local listings, or many others. Also submit to local directories, for example Manchester Online, Touch Manchester, HaveaLink.com, and many others.
Don't fight the search engines
Search engines are in business, too. They're in the business of helping users find the pages that they're looking for. Some search engine optimisation consultants advocate a variety of tricks to fool the search engines into ranking poor pages highly. We don't advise this. It undermines the search engines' business, and while it might work in the short term, they can penalise or even ban you.
The best way to get to the top of Google's listing, and stay there, is to write the best page on the subject. The search engines will be doing their job correctly if your site is ranked highest. Write clear, relevant, interesting, and compelling copy that others will want to link to. A site that is simply an online brochure is useful, but it's unlikely to be the most popular page on the Internet. Why not create some high-quality information that brings customers to your door?
We can help
Getting a good placement in the search engines is difficult, but we can help. You have a better understanding of your business and your customers than we do, but we can help you to look through the eyes of the search engines. We'll help guide you through the maze of search engine optimisation, and advise on improvements. We won't promise miracles, but we can get you more visibility.