If you’ve started a small business, or are thinking of starting one, then no doubt you’ve considered creating a website.

Placing your business online opens the door to a buoyant market that can potentially provide a high earning potential. Having a website to advertise your business is certainly part and parcel of owing a business these days, but how do you attract online traffic to your website – how do you generate quality sales leads? Having a website that isn’t optimised for search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN or even the smaller ones, is like being a sole bowling pin among billions of other pins in a huge bowling alley. The chance of your website being found by online consumers is pretty much pure luck.

Growing your small business online

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an integral element in growing your online business. It is part of a fast-changing strand of online marketing, and how far you develop SEO depends broadly on your business targets and budget.

Understand the basics of SEO and how you can use it to optimise your website. Even simple steps will make a difference to how you are ranked by search engines in their results. Be warned though, SEO is highly competitive and it doesn’t come with guaranteed success. It’s not a once-off piece of work that places you at the top of Google’s result pages. It’s part of an ever-changing digital sphere that requires you to continually tweak and asses your website to ensure you’re up to date search engine advances.

If you’re delving into search engine optimisation for the first time, then don’t be daunted by the technical jargon. Understanding the basis of Search Engine Optimisation is very straightforward, and getting started with it is fairly simple too. It only becomes as complicated as you allow it to. For small online businesses, your springboard to SEO is to understand exactly what it can do for you and how you can get started.

What can SEO do for you?

Search Engine Optimisation is about attracting online traffic to your website through search engine result pages. Manipulating this process ethically for top results can be extremely technical and requires substantial knowledge of the online platform. But simple SEO steps for small online businesses can be easily done.

There are three main steps you need to take as you work towards optimising your website. They are keywords, content and incoming links. You’ll be able to begin optimising your website by applying these collaborative elements.

Keywords

Keywords are the words that online users type into search engines to find websites relevant to their search. You will need to formulate a list of keywords that define your website. More than this, you will need a list of keywords that identify your business apart from your competitors.

Content

Write content for each of your webpages and incorporate your keywords. Content should be relevant to each webpage and should be engaging to visitors who land on your webpage.

Incoming links

This is a way of getting organic traffic to your website from other websites. Place links to your website on related websites, for example, of you’re a plumber it makes sense to place links to your website on a website for traders in your area.

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