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Optimise Your Website for More Visitors and Conversions
By bpjames | August 20, 2009
Through specific strategies you can work towards improved natural search engine listings. Over time this increases visitors to your website and linked to effective content, improves conversions.
It’s important to realise optimisation is a long-term and ongoing web strategy not a short-term fix. Optimisation combines well with other short-term web strategies (see below). Ultimately, improving your natural listings can provide a flow of quality traffic to your website and save on advertising costs.
There are several practical methods you can use to improve your rankings and things to avoid. The most important aspect is to continue to build good quality and relevant content on your website. You want to keep adding new content and update existing content on a regular and consistent basis.
Here are top tips for gathering and using the right content:
- Use keyword search tools (such as free Google tool)
- Clearly identify each page with a relevant heading
- Add page titles to each page
- Repeat key phases in the text (referred to as keyword density)
- Add a Google Site Map (and keep it updated)
- Submit your site to search engines
- Track competitors websites
You want to establish a series of key phrases to encapsulate your product and service proposition. One word phrases are usually too vague. Three or four word phrases are likely to cut out most of the less relevant traffic and improve the quality of visitors to your website.
For example, a cleaning business might use “carpet cleaning in Colchester” as a search phrase. An accountant might use “bookkeeping services in Bournemouth”. For small localised businesses, it’s usually good to include a town or location in the search phrase as most people like to buy from local suppliers and often include this in their search.
Avoid overdoing keyword density. An acceptable level is a few times every 200 words or so. Other key things to avoid are:
- Heavy use of ‘Flash’ content
- Vague or irrelevant content
- Out of date information
- Duplicate/Hidden page content
- Lack of images
Another key strategy to improve your rankings is building appropriate links to your website. The best type of links are inbound links from other websites - the more popular they are and relevant to your site, the better. Other types of links also help, for example:
- Reciprocal links (inbound and outbound links to other websites)
- Internal links (to other pages on your site)
- Outbound only links (to other relevant websites)
Tips for gaining free links to your website
Here are a number of helpful tips for gaining inbound links to your website where you can register free:
- Free online business directories (just search for free directories and choose relevant ones)
- Article sites (such as http://www.ezinearticles.com/)
- BT Tradespace free listing (http://www.bttradespace.com/)
- Business Link Supplier Matching Service (http://www.suppliermatching.co.uk/)
- Online forums
- Online communities (e.g. http://www.linkedin.com/ , http://www.twitter.com/)
- Adding comments and a link to relevant blogs
- Running your own blog
Combining optimisation with other methods
It’s important to combine optimisation strategies with other co-ordinated online and offline activities. Optimisation works particularly well combined with online pay-per-click advertising, such as Google AdWords. The pay-per-click advertising can get you much quicker results. It’s an ideal testing ground for selecting the most relevant and popular key phrases. Just like all advertising, make sure you limit your spending to a small proportion of your total marketing budget.
Have fun improving your website listings and rankings.
Brian.
Topics: Customer acquisition |
August 21st, 2009 at 4:08 am
As a phoenix carpet cleaning person these are great tips. Good Job!
http://www.theapexcc.com