Boost flow of traffic to your website
WITH Christmas just weeks away and high streets filling up with festive shoppers, more UK consumers are turning to the internet to beat the queues.
It is predicted that UK households will spend more than 22% of their Christmas budget online this year, totalling £11.5bn over the festive season. While 2011 is shaping up to be a tough year for retailers, it is predicted that the online market will continue to grow.
But with more retailers than ever offering internet shopping, how can businesses ensure that their website stands out from the crowd and attracts customers?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) can increase customer traffic to your website. It is now more commonplace for users to access websites via search engines rather than the web address. To ensure that your website is appearing prominently in the results listings, there are certain things you can do.
SEO helps to tune website content to improve visibility and is the key to online success.
Search engines allow users to search the internet for content using keywords. When a user enters a keyword or key phrase into a search engine, a results page is returned, ranking the found pages in order of their relevance.
By following a few SEO techniques you can ensure your website is well indexed and remains high in the rankings.
The most important part of making a website search-engine friendly is a good design, well-written content and easy to navigate pages.
Regularly updated relevant content will improve your SEO. Key words are essential to ensuring that your site will be visible on search engines.
When choosing keywords, think how customers would describe your products or services and what they would most likely type into a search engine to find your website. Choosing keywords that are unique to your products and services will ensure that your site gets qualified leads rather than general visitors.
Careful placement of these keywords will also improve your SEO. Put keywords in the page title and introductory paragraphs. Key words should also be used as part of sentences, but avoid “keyword stuffing” – the practice of using keywords indiscriminately – as this will sacrifice the quality of your page and discourage customers from making repeat visits.
Optimising websites for search engines can increase traffic to your website and maximising your online sales potential.
Business Link is offering a series of workshops covering key topics designed to help grow your business and increase profitability across the North East until mid-December.
:: Business Link adviser David Dixon
