Graphic image of letter A

Getting Attention Online

Advertising your website is crucial if you want to increase your customers.

Although some people will find your web site through links, emails or offline marketing (eg leaflets) most serious customers will come through advertising.

When most people start a new website design they immediately think they must work on optimisation to get to the top of the search engines, however this can be a costly and unreliable process. Instead you can pay a small amount per click to attract targeted leads to your website. This is a much faster and easier path to generating new business.

Google Adwords (Pay-Per-Click or PPC)
As website designers, we recommend and personally use Google Adwords to advertise our business. We have found the system to be very easy to use and to deliver excellent results. You simply set a budget starting from £10 per month and setup your keywords for example "Physiotherapy in Brighton" and then tell Google to send visitors to your website. Within 24 hours you will be receiving new visitors to your business website.

You only pay when visitors click on your ad (and therefore sees your website) so you know that your money is being well spent. Your first campaign can be setup in about 30 minutes and will give you guaranteed results.

Statistics
A good idea is to ensure that your companty website comes with a statistics package for monitoring your website visitors. Using the statistics, you will be able to see which pages visitors look at most, where visitors are going and what they are downloading. You will then be able to modify your business website appropriately.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
An important reason to update the content of your business website regularly is that regularly updated content improves your visibility on the worlds search engines, including Google. How search engines view your website has a major impact on visitor numbers and new leads.

Google uses Spiders to search the web. A Spider is an automated program that methodically clicks on every link in the entire web, cataloguing every page founds. This catalogue is then used to determine where your website is listed in the search results.

SEO is a means of improving the number and position of your websites listing when keywords are typed into a search engine, thereby improving the number of visitors to your site from search engine results. If we were talking about the high street, SEO would equate to the provision of large numbers of prominently placed adverts for your shop in places where your core audience would be most likely to see them. The goal here is to attract high numbers of the right customers.

Getting listed with the Search Engines
When you create a new website it is invisible to the world because the site is not listed in any search engines. As soon as you start to advertise your website, or other websites link to yours then Google will find and index your site.

Regular Updates
Once you are listed in Search Engines they will revisit your website on a regular basis to see if anything has changed. How often the search engines visit your website depends on how often they think you update your site – if Google visits your website once a month but nothing has changed then Google will only come back in the future once every two months for example.

"The more you update your site, the higher your ranking with Google."

The site needs to be active if it is to produce the optimum results for your business. That means that your site should be a constant work in progress, incorporating regular updates, whether about products or services, company news or industry developments.

If you keep adding new content to your website, this will also increase the number of phrases in your content that search engines will use to display results.

Links.
An important factor that determines how popular your website is with Google are inbound links. The more websites that link to yours the higher rating you will get.

Be careful though because the search engines are clever at spotting websites that are built solely to link to other websites so we do not recommend using these services. Simply ensure that other companies in your industry are linking to your website where possible. Also ensure that any online PR you can attract has links to your site.

Kindly supplied by Toolkit Websites Ltd
30 Carlton Crescent, Southampton, SO15 2EW.
http://www.toolkitwebsites.co.uk
info@toolkitwebsites.co.uk

Toolkit Websites Ltd
http://www.toolkitwebsites.co.uk

Guest Articles Welcomed

As we cannot be experts in every relevant subject, we would love to receive 'guest' articles that may be of interest to anyone running their own business or thinking of doing so. ADD YOUR ARTICLE