If however you have a good budget and need to see immediate results then Pay Per Click (PPC) may be the best way to go, it will send visitors to your site from day one and with the statistics packages available you will be able to see the ads that resulted in conversions and the ones that were ignored by visitors.

This brings us to another important down side of PPC and that is that Ad blindness is worse than ever Comscore, the marketing research company shows that 16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web, so the vast majority of visitors from your PPC ads may well have clicked before, this may not be a huge problem if the sales levels are good but it is a disturbing trend.

Matt Cutts a leading engineer at Google has produced a video that explains the robots txt in more detail and and answes some questions such as

Why is my url showing up in Google when I blocked it in robots.txt? Did you fetch that url?

How do I make that url disappear from Google?

The video can be seen on Matts Blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/

This is going to be be of interest to any one who needs to know how to sculpt the page rank of their sites to ensure they are getting the most from the search engines.

This is an important part of search engine optimisation and implementing these changes on your site in the appropriate manor can help your rankings in the search engines.

One word of advice, do not go too over board with the robots txt file or you might find you have stopped the search engines indexing some important parts of your website and this will see you fall in the rankings rather than rise.

Pay Per Click is a great way of getting an instant boost for your company, getting the traffic in through the doors when the site is new so that you can test to see how popular the products or services you are selling are going to be, using relatively mall amounts of just a few hundred pounds you will be able to gage if people are interested in what you are promoting.

Once you know they are interested you can begin your marketing in full force, increasing your Pay Per Click budget and bringing in SEO for the site, Search Engine Optimisation is a longer term strategy than the PPC, but it does have the advantage of continuing to run even when you have stopped paying for it, although if it is stopped prematurely in a competitive market you can see the good positions drop quickly.

You are a little limited with the terms you can promote for with PPC as budget is always a concern, but with SEO you can promote for as many phrases as you like and you will find you are being found for phrases you did not even know were of interest to your visitors.

Rather than using PPC or SEO you should be using a combination of the two so that they complement each other as you move your marketing efforts forward, testing new markets with the PPC and promoting your site into the profitable niches using SEO.

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.

If for example you were running a cottage holidays website in the South of England, a place where people could come and choose a cottage to stay in for a week or two, how do you avoid being spotted for buying links, some of the give always are that the text on the page has nothing to do with holidays, cottages or the locations that you serve.

The techniques used in linking from high PR pages to other sites worked 2 or 3 years ago and are still of some value but may harm you if one of your competitors tells Google that you are buying links and Google investigates then they could all be discounted, and this is a waste of money.

So what you want in a link? The link needs to come from a page with relevant text, Page Rank is much less important than relevance of the text that is on the page, also the links to your site need to be spread across the site, so that internal pages also have links to them. You need to avoid site wide links as they can appear unnatural, a variety of link text should also be used when linking to the site, so the link text for search engine optimisation Salisbury goes directly to a page about search engine optimisation in Salisbury.

It should be the goal of the site to rank well for 2 – 3 terms per page of the site, the home page should also not rank for more than 2 – 3 terms, otherwise the page begins to look and feel unfocused.

I would also suggest that you undertake some detailed keyword research into various terms that could bring you in more traffic, there are always terms that have been overlooked by your competition, just think, if you rank well for 50 phrases that bring in 500 visitors each a month that is much better than ranking for 2 phrases that bring in 10,000 visitors a month, and the competition is likely to be much less.

The SEO should be an ongoing and ever changing process so that it encompasses the changes in the search engines algorithms but also the changing needs of the company as you grow different keywords will become more relevant and the SEO needs to be flexible enough to incorporate these changes.

This can be of use if you are marketing your products and services on-line as you can also join these groups.

You can find out what people are talking about and what they are looking for when it comes to your products. This will help you with your keyword research and with producing tools or information to attract new visitors to your site.

When using these sites, you must be careful not to appear ‘spammy’ and just out to promote your site.

You should offer help and advice to members of the group and become recognised as the expert in your field. This will result in not only more visitors but also visitors who trust you and are ready to buy from you.

With some of the pages it will be clear witch of the keywords to use, for example if you are on the page that talks about how to value a companies share price the keywords should related to that, like “share price analysis tips”, however if the page is the contact us page it might be more useful to optimise it for something like, “contact us for share dealing advice”

Each page needs to have a unique keyword attached to it within the overall topic of the site.

Remember

Always think what will the customer be looking for?
What are the goals for the site?
Never assume the keyword research done by someone else is correct.
Treat each page as though it were a separate site.

Stamping out your competition may sound a little aggressive but when it comes to search engine optimisation that is what you are trying to do.

For every place in the search engines you take up that is one less your competition can occupy, and in the on-line world your competition is anyone who is targeting the key phrases that you now your customers are using to find your site.

It is estimated that 95% of people using a search engine will not go beyond the first page of results.

So if your site is not in the top 10 results for the various key phrases that your customers are searching for then you are not going to be selling your goods and services to theses people.

However if you are able to dominate the top positions in the search engines for the phrases that your customers are looking for then you stand to gain new customers who may never have found you any other way.

Now when you look at it like that is stamping out your competition really that aggressive or just what you need to do to ensure that your business not only survives but thrives in the on-line world.

To learn how to dominate the search engines and get more customers from your website call Sean on 0800 1357293 or fill out the form on the right hand side of this page.

A website needs to follow a few simple rules of human computer interaction design (HCID) for effective on-line marketing:

Easy navigation – the visitor must quickly be able to see what to do, how to find your products, how to get to the check-out and how to pay.

Clear images – a picture is worth a thousand words but only if it is of good quality and relevant.

Good use of colour – bright garish colours can put people off.  Your website is a reflection of your company image.

Keep it simple – every element of the page should help your visitor make a purchase not distract them.

For help with designing a new website or upgrading your existing site you should consult, web design Salisbury they offer profesional web design and Search Engine Optimisation and are based in the UK.

This increase in relevant focused traffic often results in a much higher conversion rate because the visitors will have found your site by using terms that relate directly to the products and services you offer.  In this way you know that they are already interested in what you are offering when they visit.

During testing we have found that websites using SEO get on average 14 times more visitors than those which do not.