Loading the SEO dice in your favour
For businesses hoping to succeed and increase profitability online, whether it be marketing, sales or simply gaining a stronger online presence, understanding the evolving nature of cyberspace and the nuances of search engines - namely Google - is desperately important to its overall health moving forward.
Since Google burst onto our desktops as a primary search engine in 1997, it has taken cyberspace by the scruff of the neck and taken stewardship of how consumers search for products and services online. But Google is not just a wickedly efficient search engine; it has evolved numerous tools in the past decade which if operated and utilised correctly, can really make a positive difference for businesses of any size or format.
At the 2010 iStrategy Conference in Singapore, Google Head of Online Sales Aliza Knox outlined a plethora of succinct and useful online apparatus that can aid a business in making additional profit – the most popular and well-known being tools like AdWords and AdSense – however, before committing money and time on every Google tool, every company should be looking to rank as high as possible – and that is where efficient Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes into play.
Driving traffic via Google
Let us put this into perspective: In North America Google accounts for roughly 65 percent of the US search market. In the UK, those numbers are increased further to around 90 percent, and according to Hitwise, Google controls a full 36.55 percent of the traffic going to UK websites. In other words, if a business is destined to succeed online, utilising SEO within Google is a large cog in its strategic wheel.
Of course, no amount of well sculpted SEO can guarantee a business landing on the front page of every search engine; however, there are steps businesses can take to give themselves a far better chance of ranking highly among competitors.
There are a number of tricks that businesses can adopt to improve their ranking. And this is central to success, because, quite frankly, if your business is not located within the top five rankings on the front page of a Google search, you may as well be on page 1,087.
Even when your business ranks on the front page of a Google search, the work is not always done. Seobook.com highlights an example of a Bingo Card Creator who ranked fifth and enjoyed 6,000 unique visitors per month, yet according to leaked AOL search data, ranking number one on Google is worth 8.5 times more than number five. So in this case, 6,000 unique visitors becomes 50,000. If the business plans to sell products or services, the upsurge in traffic will obviously mean potential customers casting their eye over what that company has to sell, and if a business site has the lure of adverts on a pay-per-click (PCP) basis, then more traffic means more clicks, thus more cash.
Keyword, keyword, keyword
So first things first: make your website keyword rich. And this simply means words and phrases that potential visitors are likely to be searching for. To Google, keywords are the clues that are hidden on a website which informs the search engine what that site is about. With keyword rich body text, picture headings and titles and stand firsts, the website can be ranked highly according to its keyword density. “Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it,” says Google’s website.
Google has a number of tools that can point you in the direction of what keywords are searched for and also what words and phrases drive traffic to your site. Google AdWords is a great tool for this purpose; its primary function is highlighting what phrases are being searched for and how much value they have. As a great addition to AdWords is Wonderwheel, which aims to “simplify and arrange search results” of input keyword searches and Traffic Estimator, which will let the user search a word or phrase and provide information such as global and local monthly searches and the estimated average CPC.
Using links on your website is another important contributing factor to a good ranking. Google uses PageRank, an algorithm that accesses not only your website, but the websites that have URLs linked within yours. The better the links – and the better the websites linked to yours – the better ranked your site will be.
Understanding the algorithms of Google is incredibly important for any business looking to operate digitally, and Google has a number of useful links which can be found on... Read more at http://www.businessrevieweurope.eu/business-features/operations/tips-and-tricks-google
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