smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

Imagine you’ve got a fantastically attractive website, with loads of useful information about your company or service, but it’s not generating as much traffic as you thought. What would you do? Perhaps you’d look to redesign the site or spend a fortune on a marketing campaign to raise awareness. Either way, it’s more than likely you will overlook one hugely important way to increase traffic to your site: keyword optimisation.

Websites that can’t be found on search engines can cost their owners thousands of pounds in missed business. Frequently, this is because the content and navigation on the website fails to make the most of commonly searched keywords. A well-optimised website gets you a much higher listing in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL and delivers information about your business into the hands of more potential customers.

Mike Mindel, co-founder of online keyword research service Wordtracker, says: ‘The basis of search engine optimisation is simple: use jargon on your website and you’ll get no traffic. Use the words people use when they’re searching – keywords – and you’ll get tonnes of traffic.

‘Better still,’ he says, ‘if you optimise your pages for keywords your potential customers use a lot, but which aren't used much on your competitors websites, you win!’

However, finding the best keywords is a complex challenge. You need to identify words and phrases commonly entered into search engines by your potential customers specifically, and that’s no easy task. You could simply make a best guess, but it will take a great deal of trial and error, wasting time and resources, before you discover whether you’ve hit the mark and will see a corresponding rise in traffic.

Search engine optimisation is a cloak and dagger business, so you’re unlikely to be able to learn from the experiences of other websites in the same position. Companies who have successfully optimised their websites are understandably reluctant to talk about the specifics of their work and reveal secrets to their competitors. ‘As a result, there’s a shortage of detailed case studies and advice on ways to approach the problem,’ says Mindel.

Get web wise
There are several keyword research service companies offering businesses help with optimising websites, and there are also steps you can take to optimise your site yourself.

Firstly, find out which words relating to your particular sector are regularly entered into search engines, rather than guessing. Several of the major search engine brands can provide you with access to statistics on how many times a particular keyword or combination of keywords has been searched on in the past month. Overture, for instance, is an online service provided by Yahoo! and shows a running total of the number of searches made on any keyword you care to enquire about.

Once you have identified these keywords, now comes the challenge of using them on your website in the most effective way possible. All the well-known search engines, including Google and Yahoo!, employ software to rank websites according to their keyword usage. This ‘spider software’ trawls through every web page picking out the location and frequency of words and phrases. This grading will determine how near to the top your site appears on the list of results when someone searches on that particular term. The trick is therefore to cleverly position and repeat keywords throughout content, headings, titles and navigational links, which will ensure the spider software registers all these occurrences and ranks your site accordingly.

Contacts for more information:

• www.wordtracker.com
• www.content.overture.com/d/?mkt=uk

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