e-skills UK Guide
Search engine optimisation
Improving the traffic to your website
Having spent a lot of time and money developing a website many people believe their work is done and they can sit back and watch the customers pouring in. The reality is that your web site is one of 108 million worldwide all crying out for attention.
This project explains how you can get your website noticed and make money from driving traffic to your web site.
We strongly suggest that you ensure your website is well presented and presents a professional image of your business. You may wish to consider using the services of a website professional to ensure your site is up to scratch. We have a number of guides that explores these issues:
Choosing someone to build your site
What is search engine optimisation?
Search engine optimisation (sometimes called SEO) is the process of taking your website and ensuring that it is structured and built in such a way that it will be picked up by search engines. These devices, of which Google is one of the best known, crawl across the world wide web looking for websites and following their respective links. As they travel the web these engines build a picture of the websites they visit and start to index the text they find. This data is then put into a large database which can be searched by users.
Search rankings explained
By tuning your website you increase the chances that it will be found quickly and efficiently by a search engine and be listed high in what are called search rankings. These rankings reflect the relevance of your site to a particular question. For example if you are making stuffed toys in Norfolk, and someone was searching for such a supplier they may enter a search phrase such as “stuffed toy manufacturer norfolk” into the search engine.
Hopefully by optimising your site you will be at or near the top in these rankings.
Some search engines enable you to register your site with them. You may wish to visit these popular sites and register your site:
Note that registering your site does not guarantee an immediate place in the search rankings as it will take a while for the search engine to index your site as they are very busy crawling all over the web.
Using a third party search optimisation company
You may be approached by third parties that offer a search engine optimisation service. These organisations will review your site and then make some changes to improve its visibility. Whilst some of these changes are completely legitimate there are some practices which are very much frowned upon by the search engine companies, to the extent that sites can be banned if they are seen to be using unfair techniques.
Be very careful with these services. It is much better to have an interesting website, well put together with good links from other sites and some basic techniques to improve your visibility but still play fairly. That way when you are found it will be on the basis of your good site and nothing else.
Other tips for increasing visits to your website
As well as optimising your listings in search engines there are other techniques you can use to improve your site traffic:
- Update your website as often as you can. Little and regular updates will encourage web crawlers and people to re-visit the site.
- Create a blog. A blog should create more interest in your site as people come back to see your clever insights. More information can be found in the Using blogs guide.
- Carefully consider the use of podcasting, video and more creative ways of promoting your business on your website. If you can justify using this approach then fine, otherwise don’t waste too much time as you have a small business to run.
- There are a number of online directories that can link to your site. Using these may increase your site traffic:
The Small Business portal
The Business Directory
Yell - Consider creating a page about your business on sites such as Wikipedia.
What Now
* In order to print the guide or open it in PDF format, you will need to install Adobe Acrobat Reader.
