The hard truth of business in the 21st century is that almost regardless of the type of business you do, you'll be doing some of it using the World Wide Web. Whether or not you have fully embraced the Web's potential or are still only a reluctant convert the fact is that you will know that you cannot escape its power over your enterprise.
It is because of this that very few sensible modern business owners forego a website, some invest a lot of thought into the design, some throw plenty of cash at it, but almost all realise that they must at least have one. How many however understand the mechanics of getting their site shown in the results when someone uses a search engine. Having the search engines know that your site exists is not in itself a guarantee that it'll be shown high enough in results for your potential customers to find it.
The fact that the word 'Google' is now commonly used as a verb when describing a search must tell us how incredibly important search engines have become in our every day lives and where once it would have been the norm to pick-up the yellow pages it is now often more usual to turn to a search engine to find the service or business we need. It is because of this that more and more companies are being forced to consider 'Search Engine Optimisation' or SEO.
SEO or 'clever ways to get your site's details to the top of search results on search engines' has become big business of late, with many SEO firms springing up to assist us with our SEO strategies. Usually the internet marketing service that they provide will include on page and off page SEO; put simply on page SEO is all of the things you must do on your website to make it 'search engine friendly' and off page SEO is everything else that can be done away from your website across the rest of the internet to encourage traffic to your site and increase the likelihood of the search engines ranking you highly in search results.
If you are a professional with a budget for your internet marketing it is probably wise to enlist the help of a specialist internet marketing service or SEO firm, if for no other reason than the fact that SEO can be complex and time consuming and to be done well it benefits from a focused, dedicated approach, and when it comes to on page SEO some slightly techie tinkering that will have them talking about bots, spiders and crawling.
There are however several things that one can do using Off Page SEO that will definitely help your site achieve better results. If you are able to commit the man hours to improve your strategy, some techniques are more potent than others.
Here are my five top tips for reaching the front pages of the search results:
- Blog Comments: - there are thousands of people across the net blogging away on a plethora of different subjects and almost all of them invite your interaction; bloggers want to hear your comments on their chosen subjects and so provide the facility for you to leave them. When you do, make sure that there is a link to your site attached. This type of SEO works best if the blogs are relevant to your business type.
- Article Marketing: - if you have a flare for the written word or know someone else who'd be happy to write articles for you, submitting articles to the many and varied article directories is a very effective tool.
- Forums: - Signing-up to various industry-relevant forums and getting involved; leaving interesting comments (with of course your website link attached to each one) will get your site noted.
- Back Links: - if you can convince other respected, established sites that already rank highly in search results to carry a link to your own site, this is viewed very favourably by the search engines.
- RSS Feeds: - basically a way to publish frequently updated material like blog entries; displaying the latest headlines from other websites on your own site using an RSS feed or, if your site has regularly changing content, having people subscribe to a feed from yours, is an excellent way to improve your site's Off Page SEO.
All of these tips require effort and dedication to make them work well and will not be effective unless you are prepared to dedicate a large chunk of your time and energy into making your SEO strategy work. You'll need to develop new skill sets and be persistent but above all be very, very patient.
Good Luck.
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