If you are like a lot of small businesses then you are discovering that you need to develop a web presence. You have noticed that having a website is one of the most important things to do in the near future. This short list should give you some idea of where to begin:

1. If you are doing it yourself be sure to take the time to learn about proper search engine optimisation. If you are hiring an SEO firm to perform those tasks for your website, ask a lot of questions and research what they tell you. Make sure the search engine tactics used for your website are acceptable to the search engines.
2. Set your goals and measure them. Have clearly defined goals for your website - specifically. Get web analytics software so you can see the activity taking place on your website and respond to it accordingly.
3. Make your URLs SEO friendly. Be sure they include unique domain names for each page of your website. They should look like this (www.yourdomainname.com/another-page.html). Be sure that your pages have hyphens in them, not underscores, because hyphens show up as blank spaces while underscores do not.
4. Before you do anything else, do your keyword research. Everything you do on your website should have a purpose related to an important keyword for you. Three excellent keyword tools you can use that are free are WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, and Google AdWords.
5. Make sure all of your web pages have a unique title, description, and keywords meta tag that use the appropriate keywords for each specific page
6. Write your web copy for your human visitors before thinking bout search engines. You have two audiences and both are important, but search engines don’t spend money and don’t tell their friends.
7. Build internal links with anchor text. Anchor text is a link that is made with an important keyword.
8. Start a blog. Search engines love them. They provide fresh content to your website daily and the SEO benefits - if you do it correctly - are out of this world.
9. Engage in social marketing. Digg, Technorati, del.icio.us, and other such websites, including Flikr and YouTube, are excellent tools for viral marketing.
10. Be patient. It takes awhile to see results. You don’t have to do it all in one day. In fact, give your website six months before you start seeing results in the search engines and with visitors. If it hasn’t happened by then do the research and find out why. Tweak what needs to be tweaked and keep trying.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.