Website Optimisation for Business Owners
 

Website Optimisation is a fundamental part of building a website, and yet I am amazed at the number of websites I see that rank badly, and often not at all in the major search engines. Regardless of what type of website you have it is nice to get free traffic.

 For most websites, their traffic comes from the search engines, and it is the result of someone typing in a search term and finding the website through the search results.

Most searchers will not look beyond the first 30 (3 pages) of search results and the majority don't look past the first 10 results. Therefore it is crucial that your site appears in the first 10 results.

So how do you get your website on the first page of the search results? The answer is website/web page optimisation! Now this can be easy, or it can be difficult depending on what you want to get found for. The more general the search term the less chance you have of reaching the first page of the SERPs (search Engine results page) .

Without going into the details of how you go about website/web page optimisation you should be aware of the fact that you normally require it. Even if you don't rely on search engine traffic; it is free if you can get it, and it may be very simple to get.

None Optimised Web Site Example

I know a local pub that offers bed and breakfast accommodation, and also has a website. I knew the URL of the site, as I had a copy of their menu, and took a look at their rooms. I then Googled them, Yahoo'd, and MSN'd them, but could not find them when searching for:

I then got even more specific and entered:

I still couldn't find them. But I wasn't surprised. You see when I was looking at their website I noticed straight away that; they hadn't used the term "bed and breakfast" anywhere on their website. They had used the term accommodation, and that only once, and their address only appeared in a graphic which the search engines can't read.

Optimisation for this site would be trivial and could easily be done by the site owner or designer and they would stand a good chance of appearing on the top page of all the search engines.

Steps for Optimisation

The first step to an optimised web site /web page is to:

1. Decide on what you want to get found for and

2. Decide on the best keywords/search terms to target

This we will cover in Basic Website Optimisation for Business Owners