Have a tight marketing budget? Find out what techniques the professionals use to boost your web rankings…

As a SME business owner, you probably spent a significant amount of your time, effort and not to mention a significant portion of your marketing budget on launching your new website. But all this would be a waste if no one is looking at your website. The best web design, products and services would all have gone unnoticed and all would had been for nothing. It is certainly advised that you engage a professional to run your SEO campaign – but your budget might be a little stretched. So, what are some things you can do to increase your rankings and traffic in the interim?

Here are some basic principles as used by the professionals:

Content

This is really key to your search engine rankings. Make sure your key pages have at least 250 words of unique, high quality content across your products and services. As a general guide, you should use your primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words on the content pages. Make sure that these keywords are then spread evenly throughout the article. Titles, headers and better yet meta tags should capture your primary keywords. This is what the crawlers of the search engine picks-up and indexes. In in SEO industry, application of this principle is broadly referred to as “on page optimization”. I suggest that extensive research is done in picking the correct keywords. How effective it would be would depend on the “competitiveness” of the keywords chosen. Obviously, the more crowded the market is around certain keywords, the longer it would take for your page to rank. There are specific strategies and tools that could be used to enhance this – but this is beyond the scope of this post.

Search Engines

Depending on how your web designer/developer has implemented your website (I hope that in this day and age you were supplied with a CMS) – there are specific components/plugins that are freely available that can help you generate a sitemap (xml file). Whilst search engine crawlers usually pick up your site eventually, it is a good idea to do an initial manual submission. This applies even if you previously had a website, but recently made a major overhaul. I do not suggest blindly listing your website on “directories” that claim to “automatically” submit your website to thousands of search engines or directories as there is a potential some of these directories may be blacklisted by the search engine and kill any potential for ranking instantly. Some popular search engines you should submit to are: Google, MSN Search (Bing), Ask.com and Yahoo.

Once submitted, you should keep track of any changes in search engine algorithms and methodologies. The specific algorithms are proprietary secrets, but most major search engines issue an optimization guide to assist users in understanding the changes and features. Different search engines have different tool kits to help you monitor progress and traffic. Google Analytics is an excellent start and is free to register for and use. Your hosting services may also provide further server-side statistics that can help you gain a more complete picture of your progress (eg. AWSTATS).

Periodically, you should do a competition analysis. What are your competitors doing? What are some of the top ranking websites doing? A good tip is to first review the website –noting repeated words (keywords) and then checking the page source in your browser to reveal the meta and header tags. Run these keywords in keyword analysis tools and see how many searches there are and how “competitive” they are. One way to really optimize your success is thinking about what your potential customers might enter into a search engine to get to your products/services and then actually make a purchase – “buyer keywords”.

Once you grab their attention…

I would assume that your website is already attractive and easy to navigate. Beyond this, make your store front memorable – get your customers to come back again and again: setup a database- offer newsletters, freebies and coupons. Finally- keep your content fresh to trigger crawlers from search engines- make regular updates to the images (in your image sliders) another easy way is to maintain a blog. This is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate your expertise and experience- market yourself as an expert of your industry.

Your website should not be like your brochure- it is a dynamic, ever-changing marketing and sales tool. If you have a physical storefront, you would periodically rearrange your stock and shop-fittings- this applies to your website too!