Promoting your website in search engines

One of the most effective ways for your website to reach potential customers is to be ranked on a search engine such as Google, yahoo, AOL or Bing.

This is a great way to reach people who are searching specifically for your product or service and can be very cost effective compared with other forms of advertising.

Google is the most widely used search engine on the web and so it makes sense to design your website with the Google search engine in mind.

Tips for how to rank well in Google

Keyword research

In order to target the search engines you need to identify which keywords you want to target. You will need to do some keyword research around your industry to find out which words people type into search engines when they are searching for the product or service you supply.

How to do keyword research

Think about what terms your customers will use to find your products in a search engine. If you have time, write your ideas down and try to brainstorm around them. The goal you have here is to come up with as many key terms as you can that you can use in your content.

A quick, easy and free way to research what people are searching for in Google is to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This is free and will give you a good estimate of the number of people that search for a particular phrase on Google.

Currently in the UK Google is by far the most dominant search engine, with the vast majority of users using it. Using the search data from Google is a good indication of what people are searching for.

The long tail

Many industries are competitive on the internet and quite often for a small business to compete for competitive keyword terms against other well established websites will take time and a lot of marketing.

One way for a small business new to the internet to attract new visitors and potential customers is to target the 'long tail'. This is a term for phrases that are often longer and less searched for than more popular terms.

For example if you are looking to buy a hat you might type in "hats" which is obviously a shorter phrase than something like "wedding hat".

You may be able to find quite a few of these phrases in your industry that bring with them a good amount of traffic to your website. Sometimes it is best to look beyond the more obvious phrases at the beginning and target them for the longer term. Longer tail phrases will often give your site better results in a shorter period of time.

Longer, more descriptive phrases often bring a higher conversion from searchers because these people know exactly what they want and are more likely to be specifically looking for the product or service you offer.

Links

One of the main criteria Google uses to rank websites is the quantity and quality of links to your website from other websites. In very general terms it is more likely that the more links you have to your website the higher you will rank in Google for your chosen keywords.

Links that are from popular, reputable and trustworthy websites such as news sites like bbc.co.uk, and cnn.com or educational institutions such as Harvard.edu and Cambridge.ac.uk are more powerful and will help you rank higher. It is however rare to get a link from the above examples, so don't be disappointed if your website doesn't get one!

A link from a website where the subject is directly related to your site may also help you to gain a higher ranking in the search engines.

For example, if you are a carpenter, a link from a website about carpentry or from the website of another carpenter may help you to rank higher.

Anchor text

Another way for a search engine to know what subject a linked-to website is about is to look at the anchor text of a link. The anchor text is the text that forms the link, for example search engine where the anchor text is "search engine" and the link from it is www.google.co.uk.

The search engines will then be helped to understand what the linked to page is about. If lots of websites link to a page using the same or similar anchor text that page will rank higher in the search engines for the text that other websites are linking to it with.

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