Virtually everyone with a website would like more traffic, i.e., more people visiting their site. There are many ways to increase traffic, such as off-line advertising, public speaking, writing articles, word-of-mouth, third party publicity, etc., but I like to focus on search engines. This is because studies have shown that as much as 85% of web traffic comes through search engine listings. So they are extremely important. And yet, it is difficult and often confusing to improve one’s ranking in the search results.

Today, I want to talk about one way of enhancing your search engine rankings. All search engines place a significant value on the visible text (content) on your important web pages and how that content relates to the words or phrases people are searching for. The process is simple to understand and hard to do well. You first need to come up with two or three words (or phrases) people might search for when looking for your kind of products/services. These are your keywords. They should not be so common that millions of people use them and thus millions of sites contain them, nor should they be so obscure that nobody searches for them at all. It is an art to find this middle ground. There are free tools that can help you see how many people search for any given phrase. (One is http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php.)

Another caveat is that the words you think people would use may not be the ones that actually help build traffic. Here is a fascinating example of this phenomenon. A woman launched a website selling cat and dog vitamins. Like most online business owners, she realized she wanted better search results  She decided to add keyword phrases to her site. Given her products, she chose the keyword phrases “cat vitamins” and “dog vitamins.’ She built these into her website but had very little success. Then a search engine expert recommended that she instead focus on the reasons people might want these vitamins. She changed her keywords to “hair loss in cats” and one or two other like phrases. She immediately saw a five-fold increase in traffic and business.

So, choose your words carefully.

Once you have identified a good set of keywords, get them into your text, the higher on the page, the better. Ideally, these words or phrases should be in your titles and in the first sentence or two on your home page. Note that they should not be in pictures which search engines cannot read. They must be in the actual text.

There are other places on the website where the keywords should appear as well, and some are a bit more technical to implement. In addition, there are other techniques that enhance rankings, such as linking strategies and pay-per-click services. We help many clients with these services and would be glad to discuss them further with you.