To some business owners the term SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) doesn’t mean very much at all. Your Marketing Manager may have requested a portion of their budget to be allocated to SEO, but are you sure the money spent will bring a tangible benefit to your business?

As it matures, SEO is proving to be a very accountable and traceable marketing tactic. And if done correctly, it’s very profitable indeed.

A brief explanation of SEO
Search Engine Optimisation is the art and science of modifying your website to increase your company’s rankings in search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

Before we delve into SEO tactics, here’s a few interesting facts about the internet:-

• Approximately 70%-80% of internet traffic comes from search engines
• There were over 5.1 billion searches conducted in the U.S alone in 2006
• Google garnered 49% of those searches
• Online shopping during the holiday season grew 30% ($30.1 billion total spend) from 2005 to 2006
• 75%-80% of searchers will try a different search term before they go to page two of a search engine’s results page.

Being listed on the first page of a search engine is a very attractive achievement. In this article I’d like to talk about some of the less technical aspects of SEO, and what you should consider for your company’s SEO campaign.

Keyword Research
It’s essential to know what your potential customers are typing into a search engine to find your product or service. There are many tools available to help you find out which keywords and keyword phrases are being searched for – this will help you decide what terms you should be optimising for on your website pages.

An easy way to find keywords is to pretend you are a consumer and type your product or service into a search engine. Have a look at the top ten results and analyse them. There’s also keyword tools available free of charge, such as Overture or Google Keyword Tool. You must remember what a potential customer would type into a search engine to find your product or service, and if your company is not listed under that keyword term, you may want to consider implementing an SEO campaign.

Linking Strategies
Links to your website are a major contributing factor to higher search engine results. Quality is better than quantity in this instance. For example, if your company sells martini glasses you are much better off getting a link from a web page that ranks well for related products or services over a hundred websites linking to your site that have nothing to do with product or service. The anchor text (the text used in a hyperlink) that a site uses is also important. A site using the term ‘martini glasses’ in the anchor text will be superior to a site that uses only your domain name (unless you have the term ‘martini glasses’ in your url!)

Another great way to build links is by creating unique content that readers find valuable. This can be achieved by updating the content on your website regularly, and offering newsletters, blogs or podcasts. Other site owners are likely to link to your website if the information is helpful and valuable, and this will help to increase your rankings. An SEO consultant will be able to advise you on the types of sites you could approach to build links to your website.

Page Titles and Meta Data
Page titles are the names of the pages on your website such as Home or About Us. It’s important to consider these when analysing your website. If your company sells ‘blue widgets for toasters’, then the title of your home page should be named something like ‘Blue widgets for toasters - great range, fantastic prices’ rather than just ‘Home’.

Keywords that are added into the code of a web page are called metadata. Internet browsers don’t display metadata information, but the data is used by search engine spiders to find out more about the page it’s crawling. Keyword-rich metadata can assist your website to achieve higher rankings. Just make sure you use a Keyword Tool to help you determine which keywords are of most value to your website.

These are just a couple of basic aspects of search engine optimisation, but ultimately SEO is an ongoing process. The ebb and flow of the internet means rankings rise and fall all the time. Your competitors may employ their own SEO strategies to make their pages rank higher, and search engines will change the algorithms that drive their results. SEO should not be ignored or underestimated as a leader generator – it should be an essential part of your online marketing strategy.