Business & Investing

When first taking a business online, the one thing that all businesses are concerned about, is getting traffic to their site – preferably targetted traffic. Targetted traffic is simply visitors that are interested in what the business is selling and will, eventually, make a purchase.

There is a lot of hype around how website owners can get hundreds and thousands of visitors to their site and how they can get their site on Page 1 of the Search Engines – yes, a lot of it is hype but some of it is true.

There are a couple of excellent ways for Small Business Owners to gain targetted traffic to their site including:

* Pay Per Click Marketing (Google AdWords)

* Search Engine Optimization – so your business can be found in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

* Social Marketing

* Offline advertising

Out of all of these, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the one method that site owners should have a basic understanding of, because it’s the one method that is ongoing and, in my opinion, most beneficial.

Search Engine Optimization is literally about having your website listed in the SERPs (indexed) for the search terms you want to be found for. SEO is also about having your site found as high as possible in the Search Engine rankings for those keywords – preferably on Page 1.

However, SEO is an ongoing process – once you’ve got your site listed, it takes ongoing work to improve the ranking of your site, and then maintain it.

Whilst a lot of the SEO work can be outsourced, it pays to understand the SEO Basics and why they need to be done – that way, business owners will understand whether they are getting a fair price and whether the work being offered by SEO companies is the right type of work.

My one single tip to ensuring that website are indexed, and start ranking for their chosen keywords is to write great content. Don’t be fooled by the stories that you can get your site ranked with a little bit of content – whilst you may get your site listed and ranking well for a while, it will most likely be temporary. Writing great content is the way to ensure you maintain and improve your rankings.

When you write your content, use one of your chosen keywords throughout that content – but no more than 1 to 2 times in every 100 words to avoid ‘keyword stuffing’. Once you’ve written your content, read it aloud before publishing it to make sure it sounds natural.

My final advice with this tip, is to use formatting like bold, italics and underlines to highlight your keywords and bring attention to them.

This tip is only one part of a series steps to optimizing your website for Search Engines, but I consider it one of the most important parts to the process.

Get your free copy of Get Ranked: 11 Steps To Search Engine Optimization here.

The latest competition to the Apple iPhone, which is offered exclusively through AT&T, is the Google Droid, which is being offered through Verizon. The Google Droid phone, manufactured by Motorola, is the latest smart phone to try to overtake the iPhone as the number one smart phone on the market, however that is not such an easy task. The iPhone is already well established in the market place, has proven to be a high quality product, and has an extensive number of apps that are available for users. The Google Droid is also a great quality phone, and offers many applications as well, but it still may not be as good as the iPhone.

Rumors about the new smart phone being developed by Google first started hitting the internet last July. In addition to the rumors there were some preliminary pictures, which helped fuel the speculation as to when the phone would be released, and what features would be available on the phone. When the phone was finally revealed by Google, Verizon and Motorola the finished product included a 3.7 inch screen, a keyboard, internet access, a 5 mega-pixel camera with video, and numerous other applications and features.

The Droid is technically impressive, which is to be expected considering the three major corporations that were behind its creation, and their goal of over-throwing the iPhone as the number one Smart Phone. In fact it is hard to believe that a phone developed by Verizon, Google and Motorola would not instantly rise to the top of the smart phone market. While on paper the Droid measures up to the iPhone in terms of features and applications, in reality the Droid has not come close to its anticipated goals.

The release of the Google Droid was a well though out process, with the phone finally being made available to the public this November, just in time for the holiday shopping season. Even though the technical development that went into the phone was extensive, and the release date was well planned, the advertising for the Droid was nowhere near the advertising for the iPhone when it was first released. In fact the advertising for the Droid was so poor that many people did not know that the phone was released, or that if even existed at all.

As with any new product, if the advertising is not in place to inform as many consumers as possible about the product, then sales will not be good. If there is any flaw with the Google Droid at all it is probably the poor advertising campaign. The Google Droid is a great phone, with the technology and features that could make it a serious competitor to the iPhone, but if the public is not aware of this phone, and what it can do, it will never reach its goal of becoming the number one smart phone on the market.

If your website is needing a jump start, then you may need some search engine optimisation. The leaders in the industry can be located at www.SEOmoves.com. The success of their results says all you need to know about them as a leading seo. Their specialists can craft a plan to boost your site to the top of the ratings.

The Internet is a very competitive market. Companies are competing to draw the attention of millions of Internet users, and an important part of the battle takes places in search engines. Here are some practical tips on how to increase your SEO rankings and get more traffic to your website:

The most important is to make everything possible to get more traffic to your website. More traffic means more visitors. Let’s suppose that your website is about makeup products. If it is well optimized, it will appear on the first pages in search engines when someone searches for a keyword related to makeup products.

Keywords are words that may be used by people searching for information. You can use keywords consisting of single terms or phrases. In other words, those who search for something on Google re using a keyword or keyword phrase. Therefore, it is extremely important to use the most appropriate keywords in order for your website to appear on first few pages of a search engine.

Take am look at the upper left of your web browser. You’ll notice that there is a text displaying the address of a web page and a short description. This text represents the web page title. Remember that each page can (and should) have a unique title and write a keyword-rich page title of about 7 words. Keep in mind that the web page title weighs heavily in the algorithms of all the major search engines.

There are rules you should take into account when promoting your site on the web. Don’t hide keywords and text behind images or other digital files, don’t set the font size to 0 and don’t use CSS to hide text. Search engine spiders detect these errors and you might be penalized by Google.

Every page on your site should link to at least one other page. This will increase your website popularity. However, don’t exchange links with everyone, because some websites might work against you. Only exchange links with websites your visitors will find relevant. It doesn’t make sense to link to a fashion blog if your website is about politics.

Examples of schemes of links may include: links created to manipulate Page Rank, links to spammers or malicious sites on the Web and excessive reciprocal links or excessive exchange links (“Create a link to me and I will create a link to you.). The best way to determine other websites to link back to you is to create unique content which can quickly gain popularity on the web and increase your website SEO Rankings.

The Internet is a very competitive market. Businesses are competing to draw the attention of millions of Internet users, and the battle takes places in search engines. We’ve got practical Search Engine Optimization tips to increase your SEO Rankings and get more traffic to your site!