Good search engine placement is probably the most important part of your website’s marketing strategy, especially if you plan to sell online.

Why?

Because people who use search engines to look for products or information are actively seeking out what you have to sell. Compare that to banner adverts, which are clicked on by less than 0.5% of people who seem (and just 3% of those – 0.015% of people in total) go on to actually buy anything) and you’ll see the value of search engines.
The search engines, in order of popularity, are:

• www.google.com - which also provides results to the BBC, MSN, Freeserve, Yahoo and AOL, among others
• Ask Jeeves
• Altavista
• Lycos
• Excite

To get seen by the vast majority – over 95% - of web surfers, you need only concern yourself with these search engines. The rest you can safely ignore..

You may well have seen companies claiming lots of things about their search engine capabilities, often for rather astronomical sums. For instance they often:

• “guarantee top 5 placings” (how can they? – they don’t have any control over how Google works!)
• “use secret methods” – often this is code for techniques, such as doorway pages and filling webpages with hidden, repeated, words – that are frowned upon by search engines and quite likely to get your website blacklisted
• “submit you to thousands of search engines” – absolutely pointless, for two reasons: first, only the top five search engines really matter; second, search engines index the web themselves, and find every website anyway. Telling them about your website by ‘submitting’ it doesn’t usually make any difference

There are no secrets to getting good search engine results, just five golden rules:

• work out what your customers are searching for
• get good relevant content on as many pages of your website as possible
• don’t attempt to cheat the search engines by including hidden text – they usually spot this and blacklist you
• get as many sites to link to your website as possible – and the more popular these websites are, the better
• get your website included in directories that the search engines use

The OnlineBizBuilder search engine optimiser package provides you with the tools, advice and ideas to get good results, for just £99.00 + vat per year. And if you need extra help or ideas then you can always call us.

A couple of caveats though: at OnlineBizBuilder we’re honest enough to admit that we can’t guarantee you top search engine rankings, we can only help you to get rankings that are as good as possible; and good search engine results don’t come overnight – they take up to two or three months, sometimes longer. So please be patient!