smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

The answer does not seem to actually answer the question ! Website optimisation is actually a skilled craft and requires a careful balance of design / copyrighting and internet marketing skills. There is no "easy way" to optimise a website but there are some simple steps to take to at least get a small measure of success. Before deploying a website think about a "phrase" that a customer would use to find your business via Google / Yahoo or MSN. When registering your domain try to include this phrase. Check for yourself what websites come up when searching the phrase and if [as most are] the market is already full up to bursting, try to narrow the phrase by adding an additional keyword. Find out how to edit your website TITLE tag - or at least be sure your website designer knows how to do this. On each page of your website make sure your TITLE tag is relevant to the page content and most important make sure the TITLE tag on the contact page includes your geo location for "local searches" [e.g. my company services in my area]. Of course each web page should have additional tags and code elements which help search engines decide wjhat your page is about - but - as I said this is a skilled craft and one which a business serious about generating new customers online should get advice on or outsource. Most of all consider this - if you do ever make it to the front page of Google be sure that your website delivers an experience for the customer that will keep them on your site and buying your product or service - it needs to be easy to navigate - clear about it's objective from the moment of landing and most of all "look good and professional" - otherwise it's kind of like taking out an expensive advert in a newspaper but when the customer shows up the premises is so untidy they do not even come in ! Be VERY wary of telesales companies that promise to make you "number 1" in Google. After all unless they are Google themselves [and Google do not do telesales] how can they really be responsible for those coveted Google index positions !!

I agree with Michael - the TITLE tag is super-important, as is the H1 and H2. Apart from ensuring your site has clean code and a good balance of keywords-to-content and content-to-code, the best way to optimise your site is to write quality content, and lots of it. Since this article was penned much has changed on the search engine landscape. For example, in the January 2010 "Google dance" the search giant shifted its weighting of quality v quantity links in favour of quantity. We were on page 1 of Google for "IT support London" for almost a year (got there ourselves!) and our new years resolution was quickly set by Google - climb from page 4 back to 1, ASAP. SEO is very important for us, and I believe it becomes even more vital for businesses (especially small ones) every week. We run one technology seminar a month at the British Library and the most popular topic is SEO. In that half-day seminar our CTO explains what we did to get to page 1. More-and-more it is about writing great content, building strong online networks and quality partnership (sound familiar - play it straight). But you need to get the basics in place first. More info at http://www.lucidica.com/it-support-lucidica-london-seminars.html

I endorse both Michael and Troy's good advice and would also add an emphasis on 'in-links' to your site. Links from other websites to your website have become vitally important. It's a complicated subject but the basics of it are: Google (and the other main engines like Bing and Yahoo!) place a great deal of weight on the quantity ond quality of links to your site when assessing it for rankings. They regard a link as a 'vote' for your site. The best links are those from 'semantically coherent' sites - i.e. web sites that relate to your own. Almost all links-in are good but those from sites which strongly relate to yours are better. So, if you get a link from Jo's Blog, maybe mentioning a product of yours for example, that's a vote for you in Google's thinking. Good. However, a link from respected widget analyser 'Blue Widget Reviews dot com' linking to your widgets page, is much much better, as Google thinks 'Ah, Widget Reviews has voted for this company's widget page - we'll count this as a super fantastic triple vote.' Like I say, that's a somewhat simplified example but I think the point is made. Therefore, when optimising a site try to think of who in your network of clients and suppliers could provide your site with these kind of links and give them a call. It could make the difference between a search result on Page 1 of the results or languishing on Page 2.