While there are many business offering search engine optimization, you need to be careful because some are offering substandard service, either they don’t really know what they’re doing and taking peoples money, or they are engaged in “black hat” methods, that is those techniques that are considered unethical and could result in a site being banned by search engines.

So what goes into effective “white hat” search engine optimization? It used to be about meta tags a few years back, hidden tags in the header section of a page’s HTML that told a search engine what that page was about. Thanks to people abusing meta tags, they are not used by most search engines today, you will still want to have them, but the big 3 (Google, Yahoo and MSN) will not use them to determine your rank. The most important thing you can do to improve your search engine rank today is to develop inbound links. An inbound link is a link to your website from another site not in your domain. The number of links to your site tell search engines how relevant your website is, the higher the PageRank of the site linking to you, the more that link counts for. There are a lot of other things that will improve your site’s standing in the search engines like using carefully researched keywords and the use of those keywords in the headings, subheadings, title and body of your page, still the most important thing is having lots of inbound links.

How do you go about getting inbound links? There are lots of places online where you can buy links, be careful if you choose this option that the website you are buying the link on has a decent PageRank itself, otherwise it may not be worth what you’re paying for it. There are also opportunities for reciprocal links (you link to me and I’ll link to you), but some search engines are now recognizing reciprocal links and giving them less weight when determining a website’s relevance. The best way to develop lots of good inbound links is still the old fashioned way, develop great content on your website that will make people want to visit your site and link to it.

At this point it’s obvious there’s quite a bit of time and/or money involved in getting a website search engine optimized, researching keywords, building those keywords into the content and the meta tags, developing inbound links, not to mention making sure the code is clean and properly formatted so the search engines will not have any trouble reading it. What can you expect to see for all this? First of all let’s make some assumptions about your website’s conversion rate. A conversion rate is the ratio of the number of visitors who take a desired action (fill out a form, make a purchase, etc.) to the number of visitors who view the page. The average conversion rate for many websites is around 4%, if your website sells widgets and has a conversion rate of 4% you will get 4 new customers for every 100 visitors to your website. I can see that the search term “widget” got 23,867 searches last month (September 2006), If you could get in the top ten results for that term and capture even a tenth of those searchers you would have 2,387 visitors a month which would result in 95 widget sales. Obviously the cost of search engine optimization is minimal compared to its potential to make money.

With these kinds of returns you can see why SEO is something that should not be an afterthought for a website but something that is built in right from the start.

I’ll let you in on a little secret of web design, search engine optimization does not necessarily produce a successful website, better expressed as SEO ≠ $. While it’s true that search engine optimization (SEO) is very important to a website’s success it is by no means the only element of it’s success.

The goals of individual websites may differ quite a bit, for one the goal may be to get a visitor to buy a product, while another may be to get a visitor to call, or fill out a form to request further information. Whatever the end goal is, reaching that objective is called a conversion, in web design we refer to the ratio of conversions to visitors as your conversion rate. The nice thing about web marketing is everything is measurable, we can know how many people viewed each specific page, how long they spent looking at it and where they clicked when they left so we can use these figures to analyze how a website is performing. We are interested in improving your conversion rate, here are the top 5 ways to do that.

1. An attractive, professional looking website. It has long been known that the look of your website effects peoples opinions of your company, but recent studies have shown that lasting impressions are made very quickly, a visitor to your website will form a first impression in just a 20th of a second.
2. Well written copy. The most under-appreciated ingredient of a great website is copy-writing. People read differently on the web than on paper, they scan more and read less. Copy-writing for the web is a topic for another article but suffice it to say that well written copy will significantly boost you conversion rate. If you are serious about it think of paying a professional copy-writer.
3. Keep content fresh. Nothing can turn off website visitors faster than stale content. Make sure you keep up with dated content like event calendars or company news pages, when these kinds of things become outdated it looks as though your website is not kept up and visitors will move on. You will find that changing around your home page or any other “landing pages” every few months will generate renewed interest as returning visitors notice the changes and take a closer look.
4. Eliminate hurdles. Whatever your goal is, make it real easy to do, with as few steps as possible. If you’re selling a product, put it on the home page, if you’re collecting leads put the contact form on the side of every page, if you want people to call you put your phone number at the top of every page, whatever it is make sure your visitors have to perform as few steps as possible. For contact forms you will get the best results by requiring the fewest fields possible.
5. Keep download times to a minimum. As of March 2006, 22% of Americans were still using dial-up internet access. The best way to lose a visitor is to make them wait too long for the page to load, and when I say “too long” I mean around 4 seconds!

What good is search engine optimization if you abuse your visitors once they get to your website? Give your web visitors a quality experience on your site, make things easy for them and they will repay you by trusting you with their business.

With that goal in mind here are the top 6 ways to drive traffic and make your website more profitable.

1. Search Engine Optimization. Not just submitting your site to search engines, because even if you get listed in all of them, if you come up past the third page you might as well not be listed at all. For new clients to find you on the web you need to be at the top of the results for several carefully selected keywords. This may also include pay-per-click advertising campaigns.
2. Promote through existing channels. Your website is not just a tool for making new contacts, it is also a 24/7 marketing brochure in the hands of any existing contacts that have your URL. The key then, is getting your website’s address into the hands of as many prospects, clients and interested parties as possible. This could be critical to the success of your website, you just need to include one more line on all of your promotional material (business cards, flyers, yellow page ads etc) with your URL on it. Not everyone is interested enough to call or come in, not everyone has time during regular business hours, many people have more questions they need answered before they make a decision. This is where your website comes in; clinching the deal, answering the questions, making the sale without you or your employees having to so much as answer the phone or lift a finger.
3. Establish a newsletter. Now that you have the customers you need to keep them, now your website becomes a valuable networking tool, with the inclusion of an online newsletter. Visitors to your site are able to subscribe and unsubscribe to your newsletter online and all you have to do is enter your content into a form and click the submit button and your contacts are alerted to any new services or products you are offering, any sales or other developments at your business, automatically, in their email inbox.
4. Track visitors, users and clients. By tracking visitors to your site you will know how many visits your website gets, what pages are being accessed and what features are being used. With this in place you know which portions of your site are the most effective and which may need to be reevaluated.
5. Update content regularly. Why would somebody want to return to your site time after time, give them something to return for by adding new content to your site at least once a month. Web users have high expectations for website content, they expect it to be kept fresh, if they perceive that your website is static or that your content is stale they will not return again. On the other hand if your website features regular updates, news items of interest or short informative articles, they will return regularly. Consider using a content management system to make keeping your site current a breeze.
6. Write web friendly text. Studies have shown that people online tend to skim text instead of reading word for word as they would in print. There are several things you can do to make your pages more readable and keep your visitors from getting bored and leaving. Keep the copy on your site short and to the point, use bullets and subheadings wherever possible, and break long blocks of text up into different pages.

By implement these suggestions you will see a big return on your website and will probably be moving your site ahead of the competition.