Search Engine Optimisation

While there are many methods out there for building a profitable website, from banner ads to email campaigns, by far the most cost effective over time has proven repeatedly to be search engine positioning. That major advantage search engine positioning has over other methods of producing revenue online is that once high rankings are attained and provided that the tactics used were ethical and that continued efforts are made to keep them, they can essentially hold and provide targeted traffic indefinitely. Your site will rise and your site may sometimes fall in the rankings but a solid and complete optimization of your site will insure that through algorithm changes you may fluctuate but you will not disappear.

Choosing Keywords

You first must choose your keywords. This is perhaps the most important step of the process as incorrectly targeting phrases can result in traffic that is not interested in your product. Find out more about Keyword Research Services here.

Site Content

Creating some of the new content before starting the optimization process can be doubly helpful in that it can reveal potential additions to your website that you may not have considered (a forum or blog for example). If you already have a site, perhaps simply sit on your back deck, sip on a coffee and image what you would do if your whole site was lost and you had to start again. Find out more about Content Management Services here.

Site Structure

A solid site structure is very important. Creating a site that is easily spidered by the search engines yet attractive to visitors can be a daunting and yet entirely rewarding endeavour. To adequately structure your website you must "think like a spider" which is not as difficult as it may sound. A search engine spider reads your web page like you would read a book. It starts at the top left, reads across, and then moves down. Find out more about SEO Web Design Services here.

Internal Linking

To insure that your website gets fully indexed you have to make sure that the spiders have an easy path through your website. Text links make the best choice as the anchor text (the actual words used to link to a specific page) add relevancy to that page for the words used to link to it. For example, if I ran a website on acne and had a treatments page I could link to it with an image, with text reading "Click for more information on how to treat this skin condition" or simply "Acne Treatments". When a search engine spider hits an image it has no idea what the image is and, while it will follow the link, it will not give any weight to the page it hits. If you use text that does not contain the keywords you are targeting you are essentially supplying the engine with the same lack of relevancy as with an image, but if you use the phrase "Acne Treatments" to link to your acne treatments page you are attaching relevancy to that page for those keywords.

Don't forget Offline Marketing...

All of the major search engines give credit to sites that have quality links pointing to them. How many is enough depends on your industry and targeted phrases. Running a search on Google that reads "link:www.yourcompetition.com" will reveal approximately how many links a competitor has.

The first place to seek links is with general and topic-specific directories. After that you may want to move into reciprocal link building. Reciprocal link building is the exchange of links between two websites. Some webmasters will simply link to any website that links back to them. I highly recommend being more particular than that.

Find websites that you believe your site visitors would genuinely be interested in and you've probably found a good link partner. You want to find links from sites that are related to yours. Find out more about Link Building Services here.