With the development of the internet, and more home users taking up broadband, the relatively new discipline of search engine optimisation and search engine marketing is steadily increasing in momentum to the tune of some £billion pound a year industry.

So what is all the fuss about?

Basically, if you have a website or even if you don't but you want to generate more enquires from the internet, these are things that you need to take into consideration when looking to develop search engine optimisation and marketing for your new or existing website.

Firstly, lets take a company who have no web presence. What should they consider when looking to build a website and marketing it on the web?

Is the site there to generate enquiries for your services or products, or do you also want to sell products on-line?
If the site is to generate enquiries the site should be built in search engine friendly software. There are quite a few CMS packages, which are not search engine friendly, which means the site will not be indexed in the search engines.

Secondly - Stay away from Flash and complicated coding, as the search spiders have to trawl through this before they actually get to the text, which explains what the site is all about. If your site is promoting your blue widgets, don't expect it to be found in the results pages, unless there is plenty of content about blue widgets. Write content which is relevant and on-topic, the more the better, and as much text on the Home Page as possible.

Thirdly ­ If you have decided to sell products on the web, again, check the software for your shopping cart and products is search engine friendly as search engine spiders do not read complicated database coding.
Once you are happy all these issues are addressed, and you have the outline of your site and navigation in place, now is the time for you to source a search engine optimisation specialist who will advise you on the next steps, and how best to utilise and organise your products and descriptions as all this content can also be enhanced for the search engines. (Better all this work is done at the beginning of the project rather than when the site is built and you have to re-build slightly.)

With an existing website a full site critique is deployed, before any search engine optimisation can be started, as issues similar to the above would need to be rectified. A comprehensive list of action points and observations should be supplied by your search engine marketing consultancy.

So now you have your site ­ clean code, search engine friendly and on-topic. What happens next? You now need a well thought out and executed search engine optimisation and search engine marketing plan ­ this where your newly sourced search engine optimisation consultancy starts to pay dividends.

Any consultancy worth their salt, will research and recommend key phrases which are "buying" key phrases as opposed to generic key phrases. Eg. People Development could be research on the subject itself where as people using "People Development Training" are looking to source a service.

Next will come the link building strategy. Reciprocal linking ie swapping links with relevant parties is a good idea ­ but keep to a minimum and make sure they are relevant and on-topic. Your Consultancy should recommend which strategy to adopt for inbound links to your site, which will empower the optimisation carried out for the search engines. These will more than likely be links from relevant directories and trusted sources. Each link counts as a vote and help builds your Page Rank in Google.

Throughout every stage of your search engine optimisation and marketing strategy, your Consultancy should be reporting on progress, together with explanations and information on how and why they are implementing certain elements to your site. This way you have a better understanding of optimisation and what is being achieved.

Finally ­ after a few months you should start to reap the rewards of your patience. Once positions start to show, the number of enquiries from your site or sales of your products will significantly increase. This is the time to look at developing Stage 2 of your optimisation or search engine marketing strategy by increasing the number of key phrases, looking to sell through Affiliate Marketing, developing Blogs, Linkbait and general Web 2 technogology.

For now ­ keep it simple, increase your sales and enquiries, and control your growth.

For more information on search engine optimisation, call Search Engine Serious on 01246 557711.