Influencing search engine results

Having a website is of little business value unless it is getting seen by people, and preferably the type of people will buy your goods or service.

The March survey of small businesses showed that about two-thirds believe search engines is the key means of finding new customers. Now that may be more or less applicable in your industry or in Australia vs the USA (the survey was in the USA only), but search engines do account for a reasonable amount of website traffic.

Which means that making your website as attractive as possible to search engines is important. You can pay SEO (search engine optimisation is the term for making your site perform better in search engine formulae) or marketing companies to improve your site rankings, but there are also things you can do quite simply. In fact, I’d say some of the simple tasks should be done even if you are paying someone else to help you with SEO.

Here is a quick list of the easy SEO tasks you can do to increase your chances of being found in relevant searches:

• use relevant keywords in your web and blog content
• provide quality and relevant content on your site – a blog is excellent for this
• aim your web and blog content at humans – search engines are getting more sophisticated at picking out fake pages of keywords
• make your content web friendly – search engines read headings, too so make use of them
• add links to relevant information (on your site and elsewhere)
• encourage links to your site as much as possible without getting into link farms or spam
• ensure your web pages and blog posts have relevant meta data (background information about the page) – which means it shouldn’t the same for every page
• update your site and blog as often as you can to keep it fresh and give people a reason to come back for more – fresh content and visitors both help your search engine rankings