There are thousands of people out there who are looking for solutions.

When you start your business online, your aim is to  provide those solutions.

The sole purpose of a search engine is to connect you with your potential customers.

You are a mine of information, you have spent time creating a great website and know that there is a huge market for your information and the products that you promote.

In order for your business to get noticed you now need that huge target market to be looking in your direction…How do you get that to happen?

When I want to learn how to make a wicked birthday cake for my son I know where to look. I go straight to Google and type into the search box ‘How to make a birthday cake’.

Google will then show me all the resources which they consider to be relevant to my search and put them in order of value. The chances are that I’ll have a look through the first couple of options I see on the first page and find something that grabs my attention.

That means that unless your website appears on the first page of that search engines results the customer is very unlikely to ever find you. Therefore your objective is to get into the top 10 results and make sure you get seen!

So, getting there can seem quite daunting especially if you start researching ‘search engine optimization’ and ‘algorithms‘. You can soon get lost in techie talk and think ‘there’s no way I can do this’……

At this point in jumps a so called ‘expert’ who offers to do it all for you at a ‘small’ cost or suggests some fantastic new software that will do it all for you at the touch of a button!!

DONT FALL FOR IT!!!

It’s really not that difficult, it’s just another skill to learn and get under your belt.

Let’s break it down to some basics and when you get your head round these simple points you can build on that knowledge.  

Firstly, a squeeze page will never rank in the search engines purely through lack of content. You will need to drive traffic to a one page website by other traffic methods like article marketing.

Let’s start with your domain name, a .com will stand you in better stead than any other and if your website has a good keyword and is easily connectable to what it is you’re doing, you’re off to a good start.

A search engine will only rank websites that it has recorded so will need to make sure that you submit your website to the main search engines and directories. You Do Not need to pay someone to do this for you, you can easily do this yourself.

In order for you to be seen as important or as an authority by a search engine such as Google you need to make sure that you have plenty of unique quality content at your site. Don’t worry too much about images and graphics, the search engine robots see text not pictures. Your site may look pretty but it won’t help your rankings so don’t spend too much time on the visual aspect when creating your website . Once you’ve got traffic visiting your site then you can think about the ‘image’ but spend your time on the content first!

It is really easy to unknowingly duplicate content on your website and you want to avoid that as much as you possible can. A simple rule is to remember that whenever you are posting content to your website, only post it to a singular category. Even if the content is relevant to more than one, choose the category into which it fits best. Otherwise it will be indexed more than once on your site and Google will see this as duplication of content and that will affect your ranking!

Building good, quality, reliable connections between your website and others is another way to improve your chances of appearing on the first page of the search engine results.

This is done through building links.

You can link content you are posting to relevant pages on your own site. This is internal linking.

You can also link your content to other websites, this is known as ‘outbound’ linking and finally you will find other people will link to your site and that is know as ‘inbound’ linking.

A simple guideline with regard to creating links is to always link to other sites which are already trusted by Google, i.e. already ranking highly on the results pages and to make sure your links are relevant .

Lastly your use of keywords will play an important part in how highly the search engine ranks you.

Going back to my example of ‘how to make a birthday cake’, the results that Google shows me will be the ones they consider to be of most relevance to the keyword I entered.

How do they decide which websites are the most relevant?

They do this by looking at the number of times the keyword appears in the text on your website, the variety of ways it shows up and by the amount of pages you link to and that link to you containing that keyword. 

So, now you have a basic background on using search engine optimization to drive free traffic to your website.

In the beginning, when getting your website started, if you bear these things in mind it’ll help you on your way to high rankings with the search engines. Spend some time using the Google keyword tool to research popular keywords and variations of those keywords and work your content around them.

Create a linking strategy including the number of outgoing and incoming links, the importance of sites you link to, the ratio of links to content and where on the page they are located.

You should find all the information you need in the relevant categories here and if you need any guidance or have any questions all you have to do is ask! If I can’t give you the answer, I should certainly be able to point you in the right direction!