A website needs traffic and that traffic needs to convert into leads, sales, opt-ins or downloads if it is to be considered a worthwhile business asset. Unless your target customers can find you within the top 2 or 3 search engine results pages you may as well be sticking a post-it note on a tree somewhere in the Brazilian rain forest. 

If you are already aware that your website isn’t all that it could be, you might be considering employing a SEO Expert. Search engine optimisation, sometimes referred to as SEO, is a process that improves the visibility of your website by improving rankings on search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo!  for keyword phrases related to your business. This in turn will generate more traffic to your website, but good SEO doesn’t stop there.

Why Most Small Businesses Say No to the SEO Expert

One of the most common reasons that small companies give for failing to take advantage of expert SEO help and advice is price. Yet most are losing more than the cost of SEO in missed sales and profitability over and over again. That’s profit which ultimately improves your competitor’s balance sheet.

Good SEO might is not cheap and usually requires a substantial deposit even though results may take months to achieve.  Add to this the fact that no Professional SEO will ever guarantee positions to a client and you can see why most small business owners view Search Engine Optimisation as a risky investment.

Pay For Performance SEO

The basis for Pay For Performance SEO is simple, at the beginning of any campaign the objectives are clearly defined and marked out and no payment is required until those objectives have been met.  This could represent front page rankings for your most important keyword phrases or to secure a predefined number of opt-ins to your newsletter.

Pay for Performance SEO won’t make SEO any cheaper or offer any guarantee but it does remove much of the risk element from the client’s perspective and places it fairly and squarely at the feet of the optimiser.  Where it should be!

In trying to achieve top rankings for your pages, we all know that using keywords (or keyword phrases) is important.

But, it’s also important to understand that the correct placement or positioning of your keyword phrases within your content area will improve your rankings over random placement.

Search engines such as MSN, Yahoo & Google have determined that the most important content or ideas on any page (and in any page section such as keyword meta tags, meta description tags, the body, the links on a page, etc.) will be toward the front, or beginning, of that area.

For example, using one of my sites (Guaranteed Search Engine Positioning – GSEP.COM) as an example, it’s better to use phrasing like “Guaranteed Search Engine Positioning from GSEP.COM” over “GSEP.COM provides Guaranteed Search Engine Positioning.” That puts the focus on what we do over who we are. You might ask, “Why is that important?” We’re not trying to have people who know our domain name find our site. They can just enter it into the address bar. We’re trying to make it easier for those who don’t know us to find us.

So, on my Northwest Web Design site, if our relevant phrase is “excellent service and support”, we’ll say “Excellent service and support is provided by Northwest Web Design”, rather than “Northwest Web Design provides excellent service and support.”

Of course, this procedure is just one of dozens of things to do, to increase your possibilities of high rankings. Among the others are selecting the right keyword phrases, having the right number of words in the body text, title and headings and having the correct number of links on the page (making sure that at least one of them points to a page with keywords in the page name.

However, using this single, simple technique over time should help improve your rankings.

Clifton Slettedahl
SEO Professional – GSEP.COM
Top 10 Rankings or your money back.