Search Engine Friendly Websites

For businesses trying to attract new customers through a website sales channel, it is essential that this site is optimised to make it 'search engine friendly'. This will result in a higher quantity and quality of 'unique visitors' to your site and, hopefully, an increase in the number of new business enquiries/transactions.

The key elements to optimising a site in such a manner are:

• Researching and deciding upon the most appropriate keywords, around which the site is built up,
• Embedding these keywords in the appropriate positions in the visible text content,
• Embedding these keywords in the appropriate positions in the invisible meta data content,
• Designing the site's navigation around the most search engine friendly internal link structure,
• Registering links into the site from relevant 3rd party sites,
• Submitting the site to the main search engines and directories,
• Monitoring your site's search engine positioning, for each keyword, traffic and conversion rates, before amending aspects that are not working.

As an alternative to fully understanding and implementing this process yourself, it may be worth paying a specialist agency to undertake this task for you. The internet is full of many such agencies, most of which use unscrupulous 'spamming' techniques to gain short term results. These should be avoided, as your website risks being penalised by the search engines, over the longer term.

As well as optimising your website to rank well with the search engines, it should also be designed to include content that readers will value, written in a copy style that will encourage the required reaction (usually a sale, quote or further information request).