Search Engine and Marketing

The only realistic way to be top in the search engineers is to have lots of links from other websites into yours. Achieving this requires a great deal of hard work, you need to agree reciprocal links with other businesses and ensure your website is referenced from as many places as possible. It’s worth registering your website with all the trade associations you belong to as these will count towards your site ranking. Getting involved in blogging also helps as these pages will also count towards your ranking, but be warned it will be very unlikely you will reach page one. Lots of companies claim to be able to put you top via the use of web farms but these will only work for a short time because web farms are blacklisted when they are discovered by search engines.

The other way to get to the top of the Google search engine is to use ‘ad words’. This is a pay-per-click service and it will get you onto the front page at a price. You actually have to place a bid on the amount of money you are willing to pay when someone clicks your sponsored link, and you also put a maximum amount you are willing to spend each week which stops you landing with a massive bill. For specialist areas this works out to be extremely cheap (a few pence a click), but for business areas which are very popular this can prove to be extremely expensive.

Believe it or not most small ‘service orientated’ businesses will not benefit from coming first in Search Engine results, what use is it for a hairdressing salon in Bedford to appear as the top result when someone in the world runs a search, no matter how much they want to; this person is not realistically coming all the way to Bedford to get their hair cut. Traditional advertising is the best method for 90% of all ‘service orientated’ businesses and your website should really be an extension of this.

One very good way of marketing is via email. If you can collect all your client’s email addresses, you will have a perfect ‘low cost’ way of advertising. Don’t over do this either or you could find yourselves selected as a spam mail (junk mail), or even worse upsetting your current client base by sending them far too many email shots.