Is finding your site on the web like trying to find a needle in a haystack?

As a website owner who has invested time and money in getting your company’s website online you’re perhaps now ready to move to the next stage and make the site deliver some real measurable results for your business.

Like other aspects of your business it makes sense to market your website if you want it to produce results for you. Marketing and promoting your website on the Internet is undertaken by a number of strategies, namely; Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which is often given the blanket term for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising together with other techniques and strategies such as link building and article syndication.

Do You Need SEO?

For many companies that value the promotional and sales benefits that their website can bring to their business, Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Positioning is being seen as a necessary part of their overall sales and marketing strategy on equal footing with the other promotional strategies that they may use such as printed advertising, telesales and business networking.

However not all companies are prepared for the effort, time and possible expense that can result from the marketing of their website online using either Search Engine Optimization or Pay-Per-Click advertising strategies.

If you’re looking to hire someone to market your website using Search Engine Placement strategies then we at iNet will be happy to discuss what can work for your business and its website; however before deciding to hire us (or any other SEM consultants for that matter), please be mindful of the following factors:

• Search engine marketing which involves search engine placement and search engine Optimization techniques are part of a long term strategy which can take several months to deliver meaningful results. If you need quick results, talk to us about our Pay-Per-Click management services. Don’t be fooled by calls or emails from companies promising thousands of visitors for just a few pounds a month. Talk to us first and we’ll be glad to tell you why you should avoid such offers. Take a look at our blog post on the matter for an example of the issues that can occur.
• As your SEO consultant we may recommend changes to your website which could involve an additional expense from your web designers. Such changes may include text copy changes, modifications to the site structure and navigation, modification to your web server and changes to how your site functions.
• If you’ve previously investigated Pay-Per-Click advertising and found that the costs are high, you may be surprised to learn that SEO consultancy can cost just as much and in many cases more, particularly within the initial months of a campaign. Whilst many site owners understand that the major search engines generally list web sites within their results pages free of charge, what they don’t understand is that additional costs lie within the the time elements needed to prepare a website for a good position with the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) together with the time input needed from your agency or consultant on an ongoing basis to implement promotional techniques such as keyword research, link building an and article writing/submission.

How to tell if SEO is For You

Some of the tell tale signs that should tell you that you have a requirement for search engine Optimization and search engine positioning services for your website, include:

• Do the web sites of your main competitors come higher than yours in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) for keyword phrases that your customers are likely to use when searching for the products or services that you offer?
• Is your website an important part of your business in that its objective is to generate leads or sales directly for your business? If you rely on your website to generate a significant number of your sales leads or product sales, then SEO and SEM needs to be a part of your marketing strategy without question.
• Many of your existing clients will use the web to search for your website using your company name, if any of your competitor’s sites rank above yours when this happens, you need SEO .

If you’ve now decided that hiring an external SEO Consultant is the best approach needed to generate business for your company through its website then contact us to discuss your needs.

Google’s PageRank™ in a Nut Shell!

For those not in the know, Google assigns a value called a PageRank™ value on a scale of 0–10, to every page it indexes across the web. The higher the PageRank value a web page is assigned, then the higher Google perceives the subject matter of that page to be against its actual content. This in turn leads to a higher positioning of the page within its SERPS, when people search using a term that it believes to be relevant to the page in question.

To illustrate;

Company A is a Truck Dealership in the city of Anytown; has a web page which has been assigned a PageRank of 4 by Google. Company B, also a Truck Dealership located in Anytown, has a web page with a PageRank value of 2.

Along comes Mr. Buyer who gets himself on the web and starts searching in Google for a ‘truck dealership’ in his hometown of Anytown.

Up pops the first page of results of what Google feels are relevant results to his chosen search phrase of “Truck Dealers in Anytown”. Close to the top of this initial page of results, is a reference to the web page of Company A. A little further down the page, perhaps even on page 2 of Google’s SERPS, is listed a reference to the web page of Company B.

However like many people, Mr. Buyer never makes it onto page 2 of Google’s SERPS as he’s already clicked through to the website of Company A which he found on page 1. Company B losses out because it’s web page position in Google’s SERPS is lower than Company A . This is due (for the purposes of this exercise anyway) to the differences in the PageRank values of their respective web pages.

With me so far on this? Get the idea?

How Google calculates PageRank values is a closely guarded secret, but it is widely known that it analyses the number of in-bound, ideally one-way; web hyperlinks that point to a particular web page from all other websites. It sees these ‘back links’ as they are called, in a similar fashion to ‘votes’. The more votes a web page has, the higher it’s PageRank value and the higher it’s pushed up the rankings.

You can check the PageRank value for any page on your own website using the PR Checker tool at http://prchecker.info

The Big Question

Having understood this concept and having seen the influence that back-links have on the position of a web pages in the SERPS; search engine marketers know that time spent on building, good quality and one– way, in-bound links to a web site; is time well spent when it comes to boosting a site’s position within the SERPS.

So as a website owner yourself, desperate to improve your site’s search engine ranking position; how do you go about creating good quality back-links to your own website’s pages?

To answer this question, take a look at the following useful pages on the web.

Five Useful Articles on How to Generate Back-Links to Your Website

1. 10 Link Building Strategies for Higher Search Engine Rankings
2. 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
3. Five Link Building Strategies That Work
4. 10 Link Building Strategies For New Website Or Business Owners
5. 10 link bait strategies to build links and drive traffic

So there you have it. Five links to useful articles on the web that give you some tips and techniques you can use yourself to build in-bound links to your site.

If you have any more, please feel free to post them below.