Getting visitors to your website

There’s no point having a great looking website if nobody can find it!!

An extremely important part of any website development is to think about how you expect potential customers to find your site. If you want new customers to find you by surfing the web and using search engines, then you must think about optimising your site.

In basic terms this means working out what words you think new and existing customers might enter into a search engine in order to find your website and ensuring your website is optimised in relation to this.

This is known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Make sure your web developer understands your needs and develops your site accordingly or contact a specialist SEO company to work with them.

If you are technically minded you could do some of this yourself. Here are eight of the key things that you or your web developer will need to look at:

Keywords / phrases – these are typed in by people when using search engines to surf the net they should be used liberally throughout the site content and in the web pages’ metadata (unseen data that is associated with defining the web page)
Keyword analysis will help you determine which words and phrases to focus on. There are some free sites that will do some of this basic analysis for you – take a look at www.wordtracker.com
Have a sensible domain name – this is your website address, and you are more likely to have success with the search engines if it contains some keywords (as well as being easier to remember for customers)
Have fresh changing content on your site
Cultivate plenty of links pointing both into your site from other sites and out from your site
List your site in as many directories as possible such as the ODP (Open Directory Project) www.dmoz.org
Install the freely available google toolbar, which allows some basic analysis and statistics www.toolbar.google.com
Use 'pay per click' advertising - online advertisements that are usually text ads placed near search results, when someone clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged a small amount.

There is lots of guidance available on search engine optimisation on the web. Here are some useful links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEO Online encyclopedia wikipedia’s entry on what SEO covers, how to do it (generally), what not to do and unscrupulous practices etc.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/index.html is Google’s information - they don’t give too much away, but give a lot of good general advice and dispel some myths.

http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm is MSN’s equivalent of the information above.

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html this is Yahoo’s take on what not to do.

http://www.seochat.com/ This list contains a good range of articles that are fairly sales-free along with a forum.

www.search-engine-war.co.uk is a site giving news and updates on what’s new in the world of search engine marketing.