Surveys are also a great way to discover what your customers think of the service you are offering and it is amazing the insight you can get on what products they were hoping to find.

Using this information you can target your advertising to the right market and can make sure that you are stocking products that these visitors want to buy, this will increase conversion rates and you can make more money per visitor.

One of the key elements of SEO are links, you want to get links pointing back to your site, however not all links are the same and you want the best sort of links coming back to your site rather than any old rubbish.

The best sorts of links are ones from sites that contain similar content to your own, so if you have a fishing site you would like to see lots of links coming back from other fishing sites, you may be thinking that at this point you know you can not get lots of these links because the companies like yours are your competition and they are not likely to help you get better rankings than them.

This is where planning comes into play, you need to think about what would make a potential rival want to give you a link from his site, what do you have that he values more than a link? If you are thinking at this point that you will link back to him in exchange for his link then you would be wrong, this used to be a trick used to fool the search engines but they are onto that one and the two links would be given a very low score.

Rather than swapping links you could offer the other site an article that would be of interest to their visitors, in this article you could include a link back to your site for more information.

Now you may not be able to do this with your closest rivals but if you can do it with similar but not directly competing sites this is a very good way of getting links, however writing all the articles and contacting all the sites can be a very time consuming process so to ensure it is done effectively and correctly you should use a SEO company to get the most from your linking.

In reality you need to understand that you are not going to be able to compete with the big mortgage companies if you do not have a huge marketing budget to throw at the keywords. Trying to compete for phrases that are unrealistic is the single largest cause of internet business failure other than people not promoting their sites at all.

The other main reason for people not succeeding with their internet business is trying to be all things to all people, if you are trying to be number 1 for 100 different phrases and you are trying to do this all by yourself you are almost guaranteed to fail.

It is better to focus your attentions on a few carefully chosen keywords that you can dominate in the search engines, a professional SEO company will be able to recommend phrases that are related to your business, have a low competition rate and also have people searching for it month after month and this is exactly the sort of phrase you should be competing for.

You need to ensure that the search engines are able to read what is on your page, there are a few things that will stop the search engines reading your content, the two main things that cause an issue with search engines not being able to see the text on your pages are frames and Flash elements.

You have probably seen flash elements on websites in the past, they are images that often run like small film or roll through a slide show type presentation that often includes text, unfortunately it treats the text as though it were an image and there for the search engines can not read the content.

Frames allow content from a different place to be included into a page this is often used by sites that do comparisons on prices where they draw in content from databases or for sites that do not want people to have to download the header graphic every time they go to a new page, unfortunately this causes the search engines some problems as what they see are 2 pages one with the navigation and the other with no navigation just content and it confuses them.

To get the most from your website it should conform to the W3C standards.

Well with the search engines where you are found or your positioning is all important, it is estimated that Google find and index approximately 30 billion pages a year – that is around 6 new pages for every person on the planet – you need to be doing something special to be found amongst all the background noise, and this is where Search Engine Optimisation or SEO comes in.

Search engine optimisation is all about telling the search engines what a page on your website is about and suggesting to them the best way for them to index it.

If you were to look in the search engines for this website, you know it is called “be found or die” but that is all the information you have, putting this phrase into Google brings back an astounding 174,000,000 pages – obviously for a business such as ours it is important for us to be found at the top of that list (and we are) and it is SEO that enables us to do this.

We tell the search engines what the pages on our site are about and the search engine then includes them in the appropriate index, they have a scoring system to ensure that the most appropriate pages are delivered up to visitors for the various searches completed and this is what is known as the Google algorithm it is a scoring system that takes into account approximately 100 different factors to deliver the correct pages to the searcher.

The more you make people think that Search Engine Optimisation is a secret and mysterious art the more you will build distrust and the more people will shy away from using it, and this is the oboist of what we as a business want and it is not going to be good for your business if you are not utilising the best SEO practices.

We offer seminars free of charge that explain in great detail how SEO can be used to get your site found in the search engines, we also have books on SEO and on-line marketing that we are happy to give you again at no charge there is the blog that will give you answers to lots of internet marketing questions and then of course there is the option to have us look over your site and produce the free of charge SEO report.

All this is designed to make sure that more people in business know about SEO and that they mystery of SEO and on-line marketing is removed and when the smoke and mirrors is removed you will see that what you are left with is a professional and dedicated SEO team that are here to promote your business in the search engines.

This is a new seminar not one that Cravenplan have run before and features a guest speaker who is an expert on the subject on the Law and the Internet, this promises to be a very interesting seminar for anyone who is running or plans to run an on-line business.

The date and time of this seminar are:

Law and the Internet (NEW) – 23 April 2009 at 13.00

Places can be booked for the seminar via the Cravenplan website at web design Salisbury

If you want to know all the secrets of Search Engine Optimisation then this is the post for you, we will tell you everything you need to know to get to the top of the search engines and stay there too.

Sound interesting, is this something that might be of value to your business, I hope so.

What you need to do is follow 3 simple steps, and here they are

Step 1

Find words and phrases that relate to your website, ensure people are using these words to find websites these are your keywords.

Step 2

Use these keywords on your website, in the articles you are writing and in the links around your site – this tells the search engines what your site is about and how they should be indexing your site.

Step 3

Encourage other sites that are in a similar area of interest to link to your site, this can be done in a number of ways but a couple to avoid are – paying for links and swapping links.

Step 4 – sorry thats it, the secret is that there are only 3 things to do.

Well I guess if you really need a step 4 it is get professional advice on how to do the above properly, this is where a professional Search engine optimisation (SEO) can really help, using SEO will bring more target visitors to your site if it is done properly but if done poorly you can harm your positions in the search engines.

Complete the form on your right for a free assessment of your site from the professional SEO company that tells it like it is.

If so you need to consider using search engine optimisation (SEO) to get the site found for the most appropriate and searched for terms.

Getting your site indexed by the search engines can seem like a daunting task, there are so many little things to make sure you get right, ensuring the popper keywords are on the page, are the title tags in the correct place and displaying the keywords properly, is the keyword too competitive or is it one that no one is looking for.

These are all issues that need to be considered and looked at when you are aiming to have your site found in the search engines.

When it is done properly having a well optimised site can bring an amazing return on your investment (ROI) a professional SEO company will help you with all these things and much more.

Let me explain a little, you probably said that your competitors are the other people in your area who are selling the same thing as you, or the website that sells the same thing as you.

However when you are talking about on-line marketing this is not who your competitors are, your competitors are any website that ranks higher than you in the search engines for the terms that you need to rank for.

So it is possible that you are in competition with wikipedia and ebay, this is because to get your website and your products in front of your potential clients you need to be at the top of the search engines for the most relevant keywords.

How do you do this you may be asking, well the secret is good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) if you use good search engine optimisation and keyword research you can plan your march up the search engines and you can ensure that you are able to outrank your true competition at the top of the search engine rankings.