If you are a small business and haven’t developed a website yet you are probably considering it, or you should be. If you are selling a product or a service, even if your customers are local then your own website can be a powerful marketing tool. It will only become so if the website is designed correctly, is search engine friendly and most importantly is user friendly. However you might have the greatest looking website ever but it is no good if nobody gets to see it! How do people get to see it? If it appears up there on the first two pages of the search engine then you have a good chance of picking up visitors. The alternative is to do what many larger companies do and that is go the pay per click route. In my experience this can turn out to be an expensive route.
So you have had your website developed now it must be promoted to make it search engine friendly and shoot up the rankings. How can you achieve that? You can do it yourself! There is ample free advice out there on the Web that tells you exactly what you need to do; a simple search will reveal all the information you need. Basically it consists of three things;
1. Add good content to your site 2. Develop links to your site 3. Update your site frequently
Okay so you are the expert in your field so adding good content linked to your keywords is no problem. Takes time and if you haven’t personally designed your site it might require you to embark on a steep learning curve. Otherwise pass the information over to your web designer. This ties in with number 3 on the list, updating your information regularly. By doing so you are adding more content and the more often your site content changes then the more frequently the search engine spiders will visit your site and the higher your ranking should be. I would recommend changing it on at least a once per week basis. Not of course your whole website but parts of it should be added to each week. Again takes time and a little knowledge of how your website works and how to update information on it.
Developing links to your site is probably the most time consuming activity of all. They are important. The more backward links you have the higher your placement in the search engines will be, so long as they are relevant links. Relevant links are ones that point back to your site from other sites with similar content to your own. So for example if you are a contract cleaner then a link back from an equipment or product supplier would be considered relevant, from a photographic studio would not be. Consequently you can go searching for sites that you might be able to link to and ask them. You could join a reciprocal links programme and not be certain of the type of links you are generating. Or you could pay an expert to develop the links for you!
A second way of developing good links is to write articles and submit them to the article distributors and e-zines. Again excellent for the links, driving customers to your website and spreading your own reputation across the Web. Again an amazingly time consuming activity.
A third way is to develop a weblog alongside your website. Excellent for ever changing and additional content and for getting links. It does require constant updating though, daily if possible!
So what does this all add up to? A huge investment of your time, when you should be concentrating on your business. So you do it in the evenings and end up with no social life and possibly no family!
I have been through this process of designing and developing the website and then promoting it to the point were it is ranked very highly on all the search engines for our keywords and also for some that are not! However the time it has taken up is immense and is ongoing because you cannot sit back and relax having achieved your high rankings because your competitors will eventually displace you. So I would strongly advise you, if you have the necessary resources, to invest in a good web design team who will also promote your website as an ongoing entity over time. If you have the money and choose your SEO experts wisely then it will be money well spent. Unfortunately at the time we were doing it we didn’t have the resources so it was a case of do it yourself or not at all, and over the course of the last two years I have learnt to become reasonably expert so see no need to employ somebody else to do it now.
About the Author
David Andrew Smith is the owner of http://www.wesparkle.co.uk a contract cleaning company which specialises in the care and maintenance of natural stone.

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Notice: This article above was written by a 3rd party author and included here “as is” for informational purposes only. The authors of this site make no claims and take no responsibility for the accuracy, use or misuse of the content of this article. If you like the article, please visit the authors site for more information.

“We (the British and Americans) are two countries separated by a common language.”
G.B. Shaw

There is a patina of friendly competition that spans the north Atlantic, and misunderstandings can be humorous and worthy of retelling many times over a whiskey. As an American replied when asked, by an Englishman, why he pronounced words in such a curious way , he said perhaps we went to different schools .

Well, different schools it may be, but language is changing on both sides of the Atlantic, and anyone with a website that wants to take advantage of two of the biggest markets in online business, should know exactly when search engines find it important.

It was Noah Webster who changed many words to their present form. Slowly he Americanised spelling. He chose s over c in words like defence; he changed the re to er in words like centre; changed traveller to traveler, and although at first he kept the u in words like colour or favour, he changed them in later editions of his dictionary.

So what are the ramifications of for SEO.

Let us take as an example www.opexhosting.com.

OPEX are a provider of call centre solutions in the UK, so on the face of it would use key phrases like call centre, or contact centre, with the ‘er’ ending as they are spelled in the UK.

It is not, however, quite that simple.

A tool that says it provides results depending on what market you are aiming at is the yahoo search marketing keyword tool (Overture).

If I type in call centre in the section designed to exhibit UK results, I find that the UK spelling does not come up at all in the singular spelling of the word. It seems that the UK spelling of call centre has dropped from the radar entirely.

Are we getting confused about spelling in old blighty? It wouldn t be the first time. We might drive 60 miles, but then run 100 metres, a hot day can be over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but it is cold at sub zero degrees centigrade, cars are filled in Litres, but a car that does 50 miles to the gallon is doing its bit to save the planet.

Not giving in I went back to my trusty keyword tool and tried again with catalogue , and it came back with results spelled catalog .

Smelling a rat I popped across to the overture bid tool, and found that the bids were exactly the same for the US and UK spellings. It seems that yahoo search marketing (or what used to be overture) bundles US and UK spellings in the same pot. I was not going to get any meaningful data here.

I then took a look at the keyword suggestion tool at wordtracker.com which finally gave me some recognisable results. Using its own database of searched for terms, It told me that 570 people per day were searching for call center (US) and 92 were looking for a call centre (UK). So UK English is, most probably, still being used in England.

But how do search engines react to the different spellings?

Google does take notice. If we type Contact centre into Google we get different results to contact center , as we do for color and colour , so Google does not just bundle the results into one big lump.

How do the results differ? Well for a start in the US version of Google, which seems to get from 70% to 80% of Google traffic even in the UK, call center gets 947,000,000 results, and call centre gets 157,000,000, which is a very similar ratio to the wordtracker results at around 6 to 1 US to UK spellings.

If we look at google.co.uk results are, of course, biased more towards UK results, including spelling. But with many UK websites reporting only 25% to 30% of Google traffic coming from the UK version its search engine, we find ourselves in a quandary.

If we do a search on call centres , in Google s US version, using the English spelling, the number two slot is a website that does not have the UK version of the word in it.

Put simply.

If you are an American or an English site, with any keywords that require different spellings for each side of the pond, and you want to either capture the other market or even, in the case of UK sites, be sure of covering all angles in your own market, best optimise for both.

So how do we do that.

One way is to maintain a .co.uk (or .com.au etc) and a .com site. This risks tripping over Google s duplicate content algorithm made popular in the jagger update, and marketing efforts, like link building, would have to be for two separate sites.

Another possibility is to use both UK and US spelling in the same site content. But how does this look in a site that is trying to tell its visitors that they are an eloquent business proposition. Well, it is possible to put alternative spellings into things like meta tags and image alts. It s perfectly legal, although Noah Webster might turn in his grave.

Dominic Reid is a Search engine optimization analyst who runs OpenG SEO.

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Notice: This article above was written by a 3rd party author and included here “as is” for informational purposes only. The authors of this site make no claims and take no responsibility for the accuracy, use or misuse of the content of this article. If you like the article, please visit the authors site for more information.

Many webmasters spend a lot of time optimizing their home page only. They do this by optimizing onpage factors like H1 tags, title, keyword density, alt tags, etc, and offpage factors like the number and quality of inward links from other sites. That’s fine and is something you should definitely do, but you should also take some time to optimize all of your inner web pages as well.

This is because if you can get a good pagerank for all of your inner pages, as well as your home page, it increases the chances of these pages being ranked highly in the search engines for their chosen keywords, and increases the number of visitors you could get.

So how do you achieve this? Well firstly I recommend that all of your main web pages are just one click away from your home page. You should have a well-structured navigation menu on your home page. Each link within the menu should be an anchor text link containing your main keyword(s). For example, let’s say you had an inner page about hair loss. Now you may have done keyword research and found the term hair loss to be too competitive, so let’s say you have decided to optimize your web page for the less competitive term male hair loss . In this example, your link from the navigation menu should be male hair loss rather than hair loss .

You can dramatically enhance this interlinking structure and boost the pagerank of your inner web pages further by including this navigation menu on all of your inner web pages. This means that all of your main inner web pages are always just one click away and will dramatically boost the number of inward links that each page has. This can be very powerful because with higher pagerank and more links comes higher search engine rankings, but surprisingly is something that many so-called SEO experts fail to recognise.

Another way of achieving this effect if you do not want to include a navigation menu on every page is by including a link tree on every one of your inner pages. These are those links that you often find at the bottom of pages, and are again a very good way of interlinking your web pages. As before, be sure to include your main keyword(s) within each link.

I personally include a left-hand navigation menu on all of my websites, as well as a link tree at the bottom of each web page. This ensures not only that each page of each site has the maximum number of internal inward links, which boosts my pagerank and search engine rankings, but also ensures that the visitors to the site are always just one click away from each main page of the site. This is important if they enter at one of your inner pages, because often they will then want to navigate to the home page.

To conclude, to rank highly in the search engines, you should focus on on-page optimization, and more so off-page optimization. Just as every inward link to your site from another website acts as a vote for your site, and boosts your pagerank and search engine rankings, a link from another page within your site also acts as a vote and will also have a positive effect on your ranking. A good interlinking structure within your site will ensure that every page is fully optimized and has the optimum number of links from your other pages allowing you to rank higher for all of your inner pages as well as your home page.

James Woolley is a successful marketer who has several money-making sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses:

http://www.jimsmarketing.com

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Notice: This article above was written by a 3rd party author and included here “as is” for informational purposes only. The authors of this site make no claims and take no responsibility for the accuracy, use or misuse of the content of this article. If you like the article, please visit the authors site for more information.