Search Engine Optimization - How important?

Right you have your new site! Great! What do i do now? This is a question which is facing all newcomers to the world of Internet marketing and search engine optimisation. The vital question is NOT

How do i drive traffic to my website?

ITS

How do i drive targeted traffic to my website?

The difference is subtle but vital. Lets investigate!

Ok lets say we have a letting agent website, which is based in Swansea, now we are a small site of 10 pages and very new and have only had a web presence of about 2 weeks. Now the major problem is that when you try and optimize your site you are competing with some pretty big sites, in our example people like right move, property finder, etc or if you were a DVD company people like amazon and play.

The major problem is that these companies have a monopoly on certain very broad keywords e.g. Letting agents, flats to rent, DVD's etc, and to compete directly with these companies is very difficult. They have massive marketing budgets and a massive web presence as you can see from this image there are 23,600,000 results just for www.amazon.co.uk - How can you compete with this!

The answer is directly you cant, but you can drive targeted traffic to your site by being specific to your customers. AS i already said above these sites use a lot of broad matching keywords to produce results in search engines and whilst that is very effective it is also VERY expensive. So the way small sites can compete is be specific and target buyers with what i call buying intent. For example which has more buying intent:

1) flats to rent

2) 2 bedroom flat to rent Bromley

That's right the second one has more buying intent, The first one could be typed in by landlords, agents, tenants and people just researching an area, whilst the second one is obviously looking to rent a 2 bedroom flat in Bromley.

Now I hear you saying how can I improve my rankings taking some of this into consideration!

So firstly you need to decide what your target market is. So for example keeping with the letting agent in Swansea, i decide my market is the landlords and tenants of Swansea, llanelli and Cardiff. Now how do i ensure that these people can search for the services that i offer!

There are many things you can do yourself

1) Submit your site URL to all the major search engines, remember most of the traffic will be generated by the 3 big search engines, so concentrate on these see below for specifics. (These are the percentages of all searches performed in the U.S. on the internet by search engines so as you can see about 98% goes through these 4 big search engines.)

Domain May-08 www.google.com 68.29% search.yahoo.com 19.95% search.msn.com 5.89% * *www.ask.com 4.23%

To submit your site go to the search engines main site and find the submit my site and submit your URL, once this is done the search engines will spider your site this normally takes 1-2 weeks and then they will initially rank your site.

The next thing you can do is to think about the keywords and phrases people will use to search for your services NB/ be specific not broad use Letting agents Swansea NOT letting agent, 2 bed flats to rent llanelli NOT flats to rent...GOT it, and you can have as many of these as keywords as you want.

Now i hear you ask how do search engines use these keywords. There are 2 ways they list your site

1. Organic Searches

2. Google sponsored links aka Pay per Click PPC

Both have benefits, however in this one I am just going to discuss organic (non payed for search results). More on google Sponsored links can be found here.

So you want to appear in a good position on the big search engines! Well that means you have to have content which matches the keyword search and is relevant to the user. So for example say some one searches "Letting agent Swansea" then a search engine brings up a list of results with what it thinks is the most relevant at the top, if you go to http://www.easyletswansea.co.uk/and take a look at the home page you can see that the information on that page is linked with the search.

it is keyword rich and yet still reads well this is important as the major search engines monitor how long visitors remain on site, which pages they navigate to, the longer the better. In fact if people click on your site then either back browse or close the browser quickly that tells google that the content is less relevant to the search phrase than first thought and so your rankings will be adjusted accordingly.

However the search engines don't just look at whats on page they look at what is going on in the code as well, to view the source code right click your mouse then select view source. All you are interested in at the moment are the top sections called meta tags, search engines still use these and they are still an important part of SEO.

As you can see they use a meta title, meta description, and meta keywords, i would also suggest making the meta author your company name also. Again looking at the Swansea example you can see that all of these are very keyword rich, this ensures that everything ties together.

Finally another useful way to improve you search engine rankings yourself is to get links, in the past it didn't matter what type of links you had but today they are very specific. If possible try and get one way links from another site to your site if this is not possible reciprocal links are better than nothing. Also make sure that the text that is appropriate for the link don't just use your name make the link keyword rich which matches with your site for example

"<a href="www.easyletswansea.co.uk">Letting agents based in Swansea specializing in renting of flats, houses and commercial properties<\a>"

Something like that is much more informative than just Easy Let Swansea and it also Helps search engines realize the link is appropriate.

These are just some of the things you can do to improve the search rankings of your site. Now all you need to worry about is how can i convert my traffic to sales take a look at this hub to learn more

• Coverting A Website To A Site Which Convert
• Pay per click - Google sponsored Links
• Adwords PPC Campaign management
• Letting Agents Web design
• Creating A Good AdWords PPC Advert
• Adwords Conversion Tracking