There is a fine art to website optimisation. It is a very necessary service for creating sales leads from an emerging web market place. Nearly all markets now have a considerable web presence from the young to the old. Like local competition wasn’t difficult enough many service industries are competing against international competitors who often have huge resources and facilities which can’t be matched. This further exacerbates the need for a good page ranking on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Unfortunately getting a good ranking is a very slow and unpredictable process. It takes a lot of man hours to get a website truly optimised for the web and even then you are in the hands of the search giants. Here are just a couple of brief tips on website optimisation. Comment and tell me what you think and I may write further posts if there is enough interest.

Content Rules

At the end of the day it is all about the quality of content on your website. You can have thousands of paid advertisements but if you have no quality content on your website you will have no sales generated as well as no repeat visits. Show users quality content by providing interesting information or perhaps a creative display of your products. Don’t expect visitors to keep appearing back onto your website for repeat visits if you don’t update your website regularly. Just like how you wouldn’t waste your time checking out the same thing over and over again, others wont either.

Key Words

Keywords are extremely important to getting a good and appropriate listing on search directories. Every business has keywords, for example, a project management firm the key words may be: project management, project, manager, project managers, PMBOK, risk management etc. These keywords for your business should be prevalent throughout your website. Also if you are operating within a certain geographic jurisdiction you may want to add that to your keywords, for example, Northern Beaches project managers, Sydney project managers or Australian project managers. If you don’t mind compromising the aesthetic appeal of your website you can even put these keywords in the meta and headers of your website.

Formatting of Key Words

Using bold words or headings of your keywords further emphasises your website for search.

For example: Northern Beaches Industrial Designers, Sydney Industrial Designers or Australian Industrial Designers.

List Your Business on Popular Directories (Inbound Links)

List your business on industry specific or general business directories. Generic ones include TrueLocal, Hot Frog, Sensis and The Yellow Pages.

Natural Links (Inbound Links)

The most valuable links that you can receive are links from industry partners or from popular media outlets that promote and endorse your products or services. The reason for this is that it is weighted highly by search engines because it is a unique link not from a directory filled with millions of links and of course those websites are likely to have high traffic which gives your link higher value, and some of those people may even click on the link and visit your website increasing your user hit count.

List Your Website with the Search Engines (Inbound Links)

It is imperative that you submit your website to the major search engines regularly. Ensure that your website has a site-map text file or xml file on the server to help search engines crawl your website. There are only a couple of search engines you should really care about, definitely care about Google. But don’t neglect your customers who use Yahoo, Bing (also referred to as Live Search or MSN Search) and Ask. You will find Google is the best at getting your website on its search quickly and will also likely position it more accurately.

Social Network Integration

Google and Bing are now going to include social networking information in its search results. So it is a good idea to promote your website through Twitter, Facebook, Stumble Upon, Linked In, Digg etc. etc. to further enhance your ranking position.

Don’t Get Ripped Off ‘Optimising’ Your Website

For many  all this work or technical jargon is definitely worth paying a professional to do. Be careful who you get to do this service as there are many website design companies charging a ridiculous premium for these services. Although website optimisation is a really important it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Most companies in Australia charge $1000 or more starting! This is way too much for this kind of service, if you pay this much you are getting ripped off. Ensure you know exactly what you are getting for your money when you pay for this service because for the 95% of people who get this service they have no idea or way of checking if the actual business has actually submitted their website to search engines, to directories and other website promotion means. Don’t listen to companies which give you a guarantee to be in a particular placement on a search engine because there are NO guarantees as it is out of everyones control except the search engines themselves. The only guaranteed way to be placed at the top of a search engine listing is paid advertising, and this is not for everyone.

Check out Embody 3D’s Website Design and Website Optimisation Services

We give you a full account of everything we do to optimise your website as well as suggesting future strategies for improving search results. We will even show you how to track the performance of your website. We will do this starting at $200 per a website, a fraction of the industry average rate.