Web Design & Development Services
Search Engine Optimisation
Once you’ve set up your website it’s not just a case of waiting for the money to start rolling in. You need to promote your site both online and off.
Online promotion inevitably means getting good placements in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.
There are two ways you can market your website to search engines: paid advertising and natural results.
Natural Results
Getting a search engine to list your site is no easy task. It can take a lot of time and patience before any decent results are seen. If you have chosen the right domain name, your site is coded properly and your copy is optimised for search engines, you’ll be doing yourself a lot of favours.
Code
If your web designer is doing their job properly your website will be coded in such a way that the search engines’ spiders - programs which crawl through the web exploring sites - will have easy access to your content.
Copy
The content of your site is the most important factor in getting good rankings. Copy should be written by focussing on key words and phrases which describe your products and services. If you want to know more on the subject, read our Writing Copy For The Web article.
Site Maps
One thing you can do to encourage search engines to index your site is make sure you have a site map - a single page which links to every page of your site. Site maps are good for accessibility but also for search engines. Your web designer should also submit a site map to Google’s Webmaster Central.
Link Building
In addition to these factors you’ll also want to get as many links from other sites as you can. Search engines - particularly Google, the most used of them - rate sites with lots of links leading to them as important. This stands to reason - if you have quality content, services or products, others will link to you.
Conclusion
While all these techniques will give your site a good chance of being ranked well in search engines, you cannot guarantee results. The age of your site, the subject matter and number of competitors will all influence your rankings. It could take you months or even years to get decent listings. So what can you do in the meantime? The answer is that you can use paid advertising.
Paid Advertising
If you’re planning to get a large percentage of your sales via the web then when you budget your website you need to apportion some funds towards your online advertising budget.
It can take a long time for websites to get decent results in the natural search, especially new sites. For this reason, most people will use a paid advertising scheme such as Google Adwords to lure people to their site.
With paid advertising schemes you bid on key words and phrases, the costs of which depend on how competitive they are.
When a user searches for these keywords your link will be displayed in the “sponsored links” sections to the top and right of the results page. If they click on your link, you pay a fee.
Paid advertising schemes are often referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC) for this reason. Visits which result in sales are called conversions and you can track them in the Adwords interface. This helps you to determine which words and phrases are working and which can be dispensed with.
We can advise you on your PPC campaign or run it for you. Get in touch with us if you want more details on this service.
Unethical Techniques
Please note that we do not employ “black hat” techniques to optimise websites. This term refers to unethical methods of getting quick and high rankings such as keyword stuffing and cloaking. These techniques do more harm than good and will eventually result in your site being blacklisted.
Beware of companies that makes claims of guaranteed top ten/first page rankings. It simply isn’t possible to guarantee rankings and there are lot of scammers out there. They are either lying about their ability to provide the service or will use techniques that will end with your site blacklisted.