Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of revising and fine-tuning your website to rank highly in search engine listings. When a prospective customer searches for your product or service, you want your business to appear in the first few pages of search results; if you aren’t listed until page 14, the customer may never find you. As a small business website owner, you should have a basic understanding of SEO to make sure your website is giving you the greatest marketing return.

Plan SEO Before You Begin Your Site. SEO should be a consideration for planning both the organization and the content of your website. Talk to your web designer–most offer basic SEO services, and/or can recommend an SEO specialist.

Research Your Keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases your potential customers might use to find your product or service (i.e. “Rolex watches”, “copywriter”, “equestrian jewelry”), and they should be strategically included in the development of your site. You can research and identify popular keywords using several free online tools such as SEOBook and Wordtracker.

Be Search Engine Friendly. A Search Engine Friendly website allows search engine “spiders” to easily crawl and index your pages. Using clean, streamlined code (such as standards-compliant HTML and CSS), and including a sitemap (a page that lists the hierarchy of all the pages on your website) can help. If you have a database-driven website (i.e. a shopping cart), the links to your pages may include characters like “?,=, _, #” etc. Your web designer should be able to convert these to search engine friendly “plain english” links.

Get optimized. Although none of the search engines is likely to reveal their exact formula for ranking sites, generally the most important factors include quality content, regular updates, and getting other well-regarded sites to link to yours. Writing quality content means writing content that includes your keywords, but not at the expense of readability. SEO should never take precedence over communicating with your visitors. Adding a blog to your website gives you the opportunity to add well-written, relevant information on a regular basis. To encourage quality inbound links, you can start by linking to relevant (non-competetive) websites–you may get a reciprocal link.

Search Engine Marketing. Most search engines allow you to place sponsored ads in their search results pages for your selected keywords. Google’s Adwords program is a good example. You pay a minimal charge each time someone clicks on your sponsored ad. This is a guaranteed way to get your business listed at the top of the search results, but keep in mind people sometimes place more trust in “natural” search engine listings than in sponsored links.

PostedMonday, February 12th, 2007 at 12:35 am in Website Marketing.