1. Don’t rush things. Search engines like to see websites to grow naturally so if you buy traffic and go from getting 1 to 100,000 visitors a day they will know something is not right and will more than likely bump your rankings downwards rather upwards. It can take ages to recover from this penalty so it stands to reason that this is best avoided.
2. Start blogging. This approach is best for the short term as well as long term. It is wise to have a blog of some kind that you can regularly add content to. The search engines see this as an active site as long as the content is relevant to the site then you should see improvements in the number of visitors.
3. Back links are a massive part of getting rank well in search engines such as Google. Just like other approaches this should be done slowly so that it will appear more natural. Don’t limit yourself to a single method of getting back links, you can get links from directories, social networking sites, forums, blogs, community sites and many more.
4. Web 2.0 content. This is a great way of getting quality backlinks to your site above and beyond those from article directories. Creating something like a Squidoo Lens or HubPage will really boost your rankings. These would take less than an hour to create and will be there forever. It is well worth investing some time into creating at least one per week.
5. The content of your website is vital. Everything needs to be relevant to the keywords that you are trying target. It is important that you include these in the copy and have keyword-rich links within the site. Never force the keywords in or use them excessively because the search engines are now clever enough to spot tricks like this, and they will put a mark on your website to drop its ranking or worst, take it off the database completely.
6. If you haven’t done anything like this before then no one is going to say that you should be an expert. There are lots of websites, forums, e-books and tutorials online that will give you hints, tips and advice on what you should and shouldn’t do to help your website grow and be profitable. You should spend a few hours going through these to pick up some worthy tips.
7. Check for broken links. If there’s any broken links on your website the search engine bots will have problem with indexing some of the pages. You can use this tool to quickly check for broken links.

A web directory is the place where you can find all types of business and personal websites. It is much like the telephone directories except with the benefit of searching. Web directories have main categories and sub-categories; you want to make sure the category you submitting to is highly relevant to your website. Always make a directory submission for your website to a directory that you know is read by the search engine crawlers. It helps to improve your site’s rankings because the crawler will be able to read the link’s destination – your website.

There are free and paid directories. Paid directory submission often means your website gets approved by their editors and into their directory much faster. Prices for individual paid directories often seem nominal but consider that if you submit to several of them, you could end up paying a large sum every month. On the other hand, free directories can in some cases be just as effective as the paid but the approval process is not sure and takes much longer.

Use keywords in the website title. Keywords are important because they are used by search engines to rank your site. When you make a submission, you will be asked for the title and a short description of your site. This is where you should use the keywords that you want your website to rank for. Don’t use the same title for all submissions, instead you should use one for about 50 directories and change it for the next 50. The key to make it look natural.

Find niche directories. There are basically two types of links that can point to your website. One is a backlink placed on another website closely related to yours. For example, your website might be selling automobile sound systems and its link is placed on a web page of an automobile customisation shop. In this case, the link is highly-relevant to your website’s content. The search engines like Google will give you more values with this type of links.

It can take some time for the directory owners to approve your link. One thing you can do to improve your acceptance rate is by having a well designed and content-rich web site. Avoid ‘unusual’ domains like .info, .tv, etc.

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There are many of strategies out there that can help your website’s rankings; one of these is to write articles that relate to your product or service and put them on your blog. If you don’t have a blog you can get one for free here.

Writing articles for your blog is easier than you may think, even if you do not think of yourself as a writer. There are several things you need to know if you want your articles to give you search engine values:

• Title – your title must convey the subject of the article. It helps to form the title as a question, or a ‘did you know’ format.
• Introduction – a short paragraph lets the reader know exactly what they will be learning or reading about.
• Spelling and grammar – make sure your proof read your articles. This is very important, as mistakes can ruin your credibility online and make you look very unprofessional.
• Content – give your readers some quality tips, strategies or details about your topic. The intent is to make them want to visit your website for more information about how you can help them.
• Keywords – When you write your articles, make sure use words that are relevant to your product or service. These are called keywords; keyword-rich articles get picked up by SEO robots and help get your website further up the rankings.

After you have posted the articles to your blog you can submit them to article directories. Make sure you rewrite the article slightly before doing this. And submit them to high quality article directories only. This way you will get the most out of your time.

Try to look for online newsletters, or ezines. Search for publications that are similar to your product or service. Contact the publisher and let them know you have an article you would like included in their next available issue. Most publishers are more than happy to publish new articles. Keep in mind, they will most likely want you to subscribe to their ezine, but it is not an absolute necessity.

As you write more useful articles, more people will visit your main website and more external links it will receive, which will give you higher rankings on your main website.

You’ll need to ask yourself how much time and efforts YOU are willing to spend on the website. Do not rely on your web design company to do all the work for, because they can’t, especially the ones that offer you websites at below market value! So if you are going to use their services, make sure you are aware of the followings:

1. Research – They will spend very little to zero hours on researching your business or your competitors. This is extremely vital, because if the designer doesn’t have any knowledge about your business, he/she is giving a piece of art, and not a solution to your problem.
2. Design – They use templates that have been shared and used by thousands of people around the world. They may change them slightly, but the overall look and feel are usually the same.
3. Structure – Your website will most likely not be hand coded from scratch, which means the structure would be meaning less to vision impaired users and search engines. Unless you don’t care about getting found on the major search engines, then this won’t be much of an issue for you, but say no to free traffic?
4. Layout – This is just as important as the other above. Most cheap web designers have little to none marketing knowledge, and they make design decisions by using their right brain(that’s the creative side in case you didn’t know), what that means is that you will get something that most visitors would say “that’s interesting” and then leave. Why? Because the design was not focused on getting the visitors to do a specific task.
5. Search Engine Optimisation – Many claim that they can optimise your website with no extra charge if you use their web design service. I would suggest to avoid these companies unless they have a good reputation or are recommended by a friend. The truth is that a good seo job require more time than most people think. To fully optimise a 10 pages website would take about 5 hours at least, provided the keyword research is already done. Also, some businesses will be benefited with certain methods than the others.

All in all, not all cheap web design companies are bad. Now that you are aware of what some of these cheap web design companies do, you will be a lot more prepared than 90% of the people when approaching them!

One of the many benefits is that people will talk about your service or product both online and offline. Thus, will attract “natural” links from forums, reviewers’ blog, news sites…etc Websites that rank high in the search engines are usually those who are providing high quality services or products and are focused on acquiring satisfied and engaged customers. There are many factors that can attract people to buy products or services you are offering. According to some researches made by the Gallup Organization in Nebraska; the most important element that make customers come back to a fast food shop is “the people”. People is one of the most important element in any businesses. The other important thing is having a user friendly website, this is like putting most of your products in the lower shelves so that most people can reach.

There are a number of ways to improve the usability of your website, for example, if you are selling electronic gadgets through your eCommerce store, you can make description of your products as detail as possible, include a photo for every product and make sure the shopping cart is as simple as possible.

Videos are getting more and more popular so if there’s enough requests for the same information, you could put up a series of training videos to show people how to do the most asked things. Also, you could put up videos that others have created, which are beneficial to your customers. The objective of this strategy is to provide your visitors with enough information that are related to your products or services so that they can make the right decision quickly. The additional information will also give the visitors more confident to do business with you.

The more you focus on the customer service. the better your business will be, and the better your website will rank in the search engines.

By looking at the contents of a website that is ranking well for your chosen can not only give clues of how they got their website there, but also ideas of what to include on your own website. Having said that, you need to look at least 5 – 10 highly established websites before making decisions of what to include and exclude.

Pay close attention to the number of QUALITY pages they have, and by that I mean pages that are highly user-focused, not search engine focused. If they have 10 articles on how to play golf for beginners, then you need to make a note of this because you’re going to do the same for your website. Write your content and make each article just slightly longer than theirs. When writing the articles try to focus on the users, not search engines. Sooner or later your visitors will notice the quality of your contents and you will start receiving hundreds of new visitors and “natural” back links.

You have to keep your eyes on what your competitors are doing and try to do just enough to stay ahead in the search engines. The key to success in the search marketing game is knowing which areas you should spend your time on and the order of doing each one of them. And you don’t need to do anything out of ordinary to achieve good results, you just need to do a little better than the person that’s ranking number one right now. In fact you don’t even need to be number one to get good results. Personally I think as long as you’re in the top 3, and you have a compelling title, your ad will get more clicks than the person above you!

A lot people have made the mistake of spending time and money on optimising their website without really thinking about the keywords that they want to rank for. Before you do anything you need to spend some time (or money if you want to get someone else to do it for you) on finding the right keywords. This step is so vital that almost everything you do afterward will be dependent on how well you do here, so spend at least a full day on this if you’re going to do it yourself.

You can use this free keyword tool to find out the number of searches of your chosen keywords. You can start from 2 words phrases and work your way up to the 5 or 6 words phrases. Try to think like your customers do – what would you type in to the search box if you were looking for the same thing or solution. Copy and paste all of the phrases you found to an Excel spreadsheet. Make sure you copy the number of searches as well, even though they’re not 100% accurate. Try not to think too much about the how good the keywords are at this stage, you’re just gathering information here.

After you have gathered about 50 or so keywords now is time to find out which ones are worth optimising your website for. You should have two columns on your Excel file, one contains the keywords and one contains the numbers. Add another column and name it “relevance score”. You are going to give a score to each keyword phrase base on how relevant you think it is to your products or services. 0 is not relevant at all, 50 is so what related and 100 is exactly what you offering. For example, let’s assume you’re in the business of selling fishes and fish tanks, the keyword phrase “fish recipes” would have a score of 0 because that’s not what you sell; the keyword phrase “koi fish” would have a score 50 because the people who type in just the name of the fish are not likely to be buyers – they are information searchers, however they could be buyers and that’s why the score is 50 ; and the keyword phrase “buy fish tanks” would have a score of 100 because these people are looking to BUY a fish tank.

Make a list of all the keyword phrases that scored 100. You should have around 10 keyword phrases, these are the ones you want to optimise your website for. The goal is get your website onto the first page (not necessarily the 1st position) of all those keywords that scored 100. You want to do that as quickly as possible. To do that you need to research the competition of those keywords, with that information you can start with the ones that have less competitions. Simply do a search for each keyword in Google and Yahoo (MSN as well if you have the time). Make sure you put the words in between “” to ensure the number of results is accurate. You will see the number of competing pages on the top. Make a note of this and the number of sponsored listings on the side in your Excel file. After you’ve done that for all of the keyword phrases you now need pick one or two keyword phrases that have a high number of searches and a low number of competitions to start off with.

1. You can use a blog to keep your customer up to date about your latest products/services. For example, you can name the blog “Our Weekly Special Offers” and update it once a week.
2. You can use a blog to provide valuable information that relate to your industry – information which your target audience would be interested in. For example, if you’re in the music instrument business and you sell guitars and drums, you can use the blog to write tutorials on how to play guitar, how to choose a good guitar, how to tune a guitar, review a new guitar once a week ..etc
3. You can use a blog to improve the search engine ranking of your existing website. Search engines doesn’t rank websites, they rank pages, a link from one page to another would be counted as a vote and the more votes you have the higher you will be ranked in the search engines. Of course, not all votes are the same, there’re many factors that determine how much a link is worth in the search engine’s system. I won’t go into the finer details of how search engine works, for now you just need to remember that the more pages you have (must be related), the higher your website will rank and the more traffic you will receive. You don’t need to do anything special, you just need to write quality contents that are good for humans, not search engines. Never try to stuff keywords in articles because it will do more damages than goods in the LONG TERM. This does take time and you probably won’t see any significant results in the first 6 months, stick to it for another 6 months or so and you will see your website traffic and business improve dramatically.

First of all, use this online tool to create your sitemap. It will take a minute or two for the system to go through all the pages of your website and then it will give you the option of downloading the generated sitemap file(xml file). Download the file to your desktop (or somewhere easy to find) and rename it to sitemap.xml. The next step is slightly more complicated, you’ll need to login to your website control panel where all the files and images are, and put the sitemap file in the root folder. An easy way to do that is to find a file named ‘index.html’ and that’s where you should put the sitemap file.

The next step is much easier compared to previous one. You need to register for a Google Webmaster Tools account, it’s completely free and here’s the link.

Once you’ve gone through the registration process you should see the dashboard. Add your website and then click the add link next to your website to add a sitemap. The type of sitemap should be ‘general’ and in the third option you’ll need to type in the name of your sitemap file (sitemap.xml).