smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

Registering with search engines is essential if you are looking to generate traffic to your website and promote it to both existing and new customers. The first thing to do is to research the key words that are most relevant to your business or product.

You can register your website on individual sites yourself but be aware that this can be a time-consuming process. You can sign up online with a service such as the one Overture offers. In this way, you can target anyone searching for your product or service on hundreds of websites and portals, such as Yahoo, MSN, Freeserve, AOL and Lycos to name but a few.

“When choosing keywords, be honest and factual in your descriptions – this is what attracts consumers. Choose a variety of relevant terms and remember that some of the highest conversion rates come from the less popular terms,” advises Karen Salamon, marketing director of Overture Northern Europe.

Overture offers a range of tools that you can access for free to help you choose keywords. For example, you can see the number of searches and related searches for terms associated with your business, and you can also see how much your competitors are bidding on the terms you’re interested in.

Salamon adds that including the search term in your titles and descriptions can give you a 50% higher click-through rate. Understanding your target audience and how they carry out searches is also important. And what can you expect to pay?

“With pay-for-performance search, advertisers bid for search terms and only pay when a customer actually clicks through to their site from a search engine. Bid prices start from just 10p,” claims Salamon.

She adds that as a general rule, the more generic the term, the more expensive the bid price.

To attract the most relevant customers to your site, and to increase the chances of them doing what you want them to do when they get there, Salamon advocates the following:

- Make sure your search item, title, description and website are directly relevant to each other

- Where possible, include the search term in either your title and description (ideally in both), as users respond to this

- Deep-linking – give a direct URL to the relevant content. This will give you a faster processing time and give a higher quality user experience

- Do not use superlatives – saying you’re the best doesn’t ensure honest, factual listings and you won’t get listed. If you really are the best, back it up with relevant evidence on your site

(19/2/04)

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