It’s all well and good telling customers your business has a website, but much of your traffic will come from random users searching for a topic on Google or another search engine. As a result, you need to optimise your site for these search engines.
The first part of making your website attractive to search engine “bots” is constructing pages full of rich, descriptive text. The more you use “keywords” and text relating to your business and what you actually do, the more likely you’ll appear higher in Google rankings.
There are also various ways of tweaking the language you use on your site to maximise how relevant
Google decides you are. There are plenty of companies that specialise in SEO that can help you optimise your website.
But be careful of just producing slabs of text for no reason. This practice is known as “blackhat SEO” and Google often publishes businesses that do it.
You should also register your business through various location-based services as well, like Google Maps, which means your business will start appearing on maps searches.
Making sure you have descriptive pages is also why you should avoid making a website full of Flash images and animation. These are often good ways to keep users interacted with your website, but search engines don’t pick them up and won’t give you a boost in rankings.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
