Make sure that you use your top keywords in your website copy. The text of your pages should contain your keywords in the exact phrasing as you have them in your meta tags and title. To make this even stronger, you can make them bold.

This is a crucial step to get conversions, since when people search for “your [YourTown]”, they want to see a page on your in [YourTown]. A conversion is when a customer contacts you regarding your offering or signs up for a newsletter or takes any action you would like them to take.

When your web page does not include the keyword your customer typed in when looking for your products, it is not very likely that they will keep browsing your website. Moreover, it is recommended that you create a separate page for each of your keyword, or combination of keywords.

The more text, the better for search engine spiders when they index a website; it is strongly recommended that your homepage has at least 200-300 words of “visible” text. Moreover, search engine spiders crawl especially the first 20 words of your website so try to keep an eye on them and make them really relevant to what your website is about.

Although SEO might seem to be a simple and relatively easy-to-use way of improving your website ranking, which helps your customers find your website easier, there is also a possibility of abuse. This can finally lead to your website being excluded from the search engines listings. Therefore it is crucial to know the difference between techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design (so called “White Hat” SEO) and those that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimise their effect (referred to as “Black Hat” SEO or spamdexing).

Another interesting fact to know is that search engines change their search criteria daily. There are usually very subtle changes an average website owner does not need to track. Their purpose is to prevent spamdexing or at least make it as difficult as possible.

Bad search engine optimisation techniques can get you blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density too high, mirror pages and mirror sites.

While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for short time in the long run they will hurt your website.

Therefore we recommend you rather avoid the following:

• Doing anything to trick the search engines. If what you are doing is not listed as one of the previous “white hat SEO” the search engines will likely view it as spam and penalise you.
• List keywords anywhere except in your keywords meta tag. It is thus not usual to name keywords alone without any other “sentence stuffing”. Search engines know this and will consider you spamdexing.
• Use the same colour text on your page as the page’s background colour. This has been used by some people to stuff their web pages with keywords, which is not a clear practice. Search engines are able to detect this and view it as spam.
• Use the same meta tag more than once on the same web page, for example using more than one title tag.
• Use any keywords in your keywords meta tag that do not relate to the content of your website.

Once we have optimised the website for customers, let’s make sure that Google and other search engines will find it and show it to people who type in your related search terms.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) means “optimising” your website for search engines, so that, ideally, your website will come up as one of the first 10 sites when people search for keywords related to your. This is essential to your website traffic (understand, “number of visitors”) which might lead to further sales leads generation.

Unless you are an online marketing consultant or at least have some experience with online marketing, you might realise one day that there are abbreviations that marketing people use every day but nobody ever explains them clearly.

This is what we think are the vital “must-knows” of online marketing:

• SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
  Any aspect of online marketing that is aimed at improving your ranking in search engines, such as Google or Yahoo.

• PPC = Pay per Click
  An online advertising campaign run by search engines like Google or Yahoo, where you pay only when somebody clicks on your ad and gets to your website; ad impressions are free unless anybody clicks on them. Google Adwords are an example.

• CPC = Cost per Click
  How much you pay for one click on your ad in a PPC campaign.

Pay per Click campaigns, apart from attracting visitors to your website, are an excellent source of indispensable information about how often individual keywords are being searched for and whether customers who come to your website searching for these keywords actually buy your services/contact you etc. This is one of the basics we need to know when we are choosing keywords for on-page optimisation (SEO).

We reckon that this data is even more relevant to the reality than the data provided by available free keyword tools.

It is not that difficult – having run and tracked your PPC campaigns for some time, you will easily find out which keywords are performing the best for you. In the next stage, you will simply include these keywords in your website more often and try to create content more relevant to these keywords. Best performing keywords should be in your meta tags as well.

You might ask how to know whether a keyword performs well or not. There are various indicators of this and you might decide which ones to follow. However, we recommend using them in the following priority order:

• The most important, something you probably want most to get from your SEO and PPC campaigns, is a high number of conversions. A conversion is when a visitor clicks on any page of your website you choose and set as a conversion goal. Usually, these pages are those which show after a visitor bought something, or signed up for your newsletter.
• Another one successful performance indicator is click-through rate (CTR).
• Apart from the above mentioned, you should also control your costs per click (CPC). Google Adwords campaign costs are partly based on CTR of your particular keywords – the higher CTR you achieve, the less you pay for a click. So if you want to save your budget, make sure your keywords match to your ads.
• Impressions are another measure you can see in your PPC stats. They tell you how many times your ad has been displayed. However, when you get high impressions without sufficient number of clicks, your CTR decreases and you pay more for every click. I definitely would not recommend using high impressions automatically as a positive criterion of assessing your keyword performance.However, Impressions can give you a good indication on what keywords are being searched for most, so that you can then include them in your search engine optimisation.

The first step of your SEO (after you have optimised your website for customers) is to make the best keyword list possible. A keyword is a word or a phrase people who are looking for products type in Google. For example, one of your keywords may be “your”.

However, it is better to focus on specific key phrases that will get more highly targeted people to your site. That means, do not use just “your”, as there are many people searching for this word, but many of them might be actually looking for a job in your, for example. Also, the competition is usually much stronger with these words, so it will take more time to get ranked on the first page.

Instead, go for longer keyword phrases and combinations such as “your [YourTown]”, “your company” etc.

Moreover, I would advise you to apply the following methodology to choose the right key words:

1. Organize a brainstorming with your co-workers, business partners, friends, relatives or even customers to find keywords relevant to your your business. Focus on the needs of customers, what they would type in when looking for products.
2. Check out your competitors’ websites for ideas. View the source HTML code and take a look at keywords in their meta tags (you will learn below how to do this). They could be a good tip for yours!
3. Try to make a list of 100 keywords minimum. It’s recommended to use a search term suggestion tool (such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool). It will give you an idea what your phrases have been searched for recently. Just make sure that you pick the appropriate location.

When you have your 7 keywords for every of your main pages, the next step is to place them on your website, in the correct way.

There are a few places where you definitely should have them – some are pretty obvious, some are slightly hidden – so let’s make sure you get them all right!

Title

<Title> is one of the most powerful SEO techniques you have, so make sure you use it creatively! When search engine results are displayed, e.g. on Google’s search results page, the title is the first thing people see as a link to your website.

You can also see the title of the website you are just viewing on the top of your browser window.

Thus each page should have a different <title> with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. The title should explain in a few short words (your keywords) the intent of the page. Don’t put your company name first – place your keywords first and if you feel you absolutely must have the company name in the title, add it second.

Despite its importance, rather do not overdo it with the length of the <title> tag; 50-150 characters including spaces should be appropriate, even though some SEO gurus recommend 70 max. You also should make the title enticing, so that the viewers of search engines listings will click to see your website.

Description Meta Tag

Below the <title>, there is usually the description meta tag which is considered by Google as the first sentence on a page.

The Description Meta tag is also fairly important. Your description should have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning and so should your first sentence on the website. Just like the <title>, reflect the content and try to keep there no more than 200 characters including spaces. Change the words around enough so that you can hit various typings of your keywords.

Compared to title, description meta tag should be rather a sentence or two, not just a list of keywords. Make sure you use speech marks correctly as appropriate.

You should have a different title, description and a first sentence on each page. You may also want to try shorter titles with only one keyword or keyword phrase as this will raise you keyword relevance.

Keyword Meta Tag

Although many people rely on them so much when performing SEO, meta tags have decreased in importance recently, but are still worth using for clarity and search results. Their initial purpose was to help search engines find out important information about your page which they might have had difficulty determining otherwise.

The Keyword tag is now the least important but is still used by some engines. As you never know when the rules of the search engines will change, or a new engine will want them, so take the time to include these tags in all your web pages. We recommend you do not overdo it with keywords as well; your keyword meta tag should not exceed 250 characters including spaces.

When performing SEO, you should take the exact same keyword phrase from your keyword meta tag, and use it in the copy of your page, title tag, meta description, text content of the page etc. Any keyword phrases which are only used in your keyword meta tag, will not have enough prominence to help your listings for that phrase.

Now upload these meta tags to the web pages. You might need a hand from your web designer – it should be a very quick issue for them.

Many your website owners do not make it easy, clear and secure for people to contact them – if you want customers to contact you directly from your website, keep the process simple.

In general, over 60 percent of online shoppers abort the ordering process once they’ve entered the shopping cart. It’s a pity that after gaining their attention, interest and desire you can still lose them due to a complicated, unclear or unsafe contact form. To prevent this, try to follow the advice:

• Tell your visitors upfront about what they should do in order to get in touch with you.
• Make sure that your contact pages and forms are easy to understand. Test them with your customers or relatives even if they don’t browse the Internet very often.
• Make sure that your contact page shows an understandable notice if the customer forgets to enter the email address or any other required field.
• Make sure that your contact pages work in every geographical area you target. Some countries don’t have postal numbers or their regional structuring can be different from yours.
• It’s very important that your contact pages are secure.
• Test your contact pages regularly in order to make sure they work.
• Also make the contact form easier to fill in – in most cases, all you probably need will be name, phone, email, and the comment field – they don’t need to be mandatory.

After you implement the above steps, you might see that your online marketing has moved to the next level.

The crucial step of online marketing is setting a goal you want to achieve. What is it that you want your visitors to do? This could be one of the following:

• Fill in a contact us form
• Fill in an enquiry form
• Register for a free consultation/appointment
• Sign up for a newsletter with free your tips
• Download a free ebook with your advice
• Read articles for/about customers
• Take a survey
• Participate in a competition etc.

Ideally you will be able to put a value on each of your goals – i.e. how much is each step worth to your business? By stating this, you will be able to see clearly where your focus should be and how to work most effectively.

Does your website work as a 24/7 sales tool, bringing in sales leads even when you sleep? Or are you having a problem with your website?

Why are you not getting more visitors that contact you or buy from you?

Could you use search engine optimisation, Google Adwords and powerful website content to get more online visitors, more online leads and more online sales?

How about focusing on the following 4 areas right now:

• Learn what you can improve on your website, so that more of your visitors will actually contact you
• Find out about the magic of search engine optimisation and how to have your website ranked in Google
• Understand the power of online newsletters and blogs and know how to setup your own ones fast
• Discover the secret of using online social networking websites for your business