smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

In a competitive business climate an online presence is increasingly important for small businesses. One way to drive traffic to your site is to boost your ranking on the top search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The majority of internet users find websites through search engines but most don’t bother looking at the results beyond the first couple of pages, so it’s vital that your site is featured in the top results.

This guide from SmallBusiness.co.uk provides some techniques you can use to improve the chances of your site appearing in a prominent and relevant position in search results:

How do search engines work? - Search engines often use a spider system to search websites, which means they regularly ‘crawl’ the web taking snapshots of web pages to include within its search index.

When a user enters a search term into the engine it provides a list of web pages in order of relevancy to that enquiry.

Individual pages on your website are analysed and ranked according to certain criteria, including the relevant words within the text on your site and the quantity and quality of the web pages that link to your site.

There are several ways to increase your chances of achieving a higher ranking:

Use keywords - Key phrases used in text and page titles on your website that relate to what you are offering will be picked up by the spiders and make your site more relevant when a user enters them into a search facility.

For example, if your business arranges weddings in Birmingham, one keyword for your site would obviously be ‘wedding’. However, as there will be hundreds of other similar businesses, it will be difficult for you to guarantee a high ranking against this one keyword, so choose key phrases of at least two or three words â“ like wedding, honeymoon and bride.

This will increase your chances of appearing in the results when a user types in those search terms. But make sure you don’t repeat them excessively or you may be accused of spamming the search engine and black-listed. The content of your site should be readable and relevant to your business.

A useful tool to help you choose your keyword phrases is Overture's Search Term Suggestion tool, which gives you an idea of how popular terms are and lists associated phrases that you may also want to use.

Use relevant links - Just as you would include links from one page to another in order to help users move around your website, search engine spiders use links to move around your web pages and read them. Create a homepage that includes the main keywords in the content and also links through to the relevant pages so that the search engine crawls your whole site.

Ask other businesses to link to you - Search engines often regard links from other web pages as a ‘vote' that your site is important. This is why it’s vital to get other sites to link to pages within your site in order to increase your importance and search result ranking.

It is better to get links from other web pages that rank highly, as search engines will analyse the web pages that have voted for you, decide whether they are important and judge how significant the links are, which again, affects your ranking.

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