Lyons Leadership

If you use a website for your company you would surely love to be found the first page of a search engine’s search results.  It’s all about bringing coveted traffic and visitors to your site for your market.   Paying a company to optimize your web site for you is still less expensive than just about any other form of traditional marketing.  For example a Toronto search engine optimization company may charge a few hundred dollars per month for their expertise.  In comparison you would easily spend upwards of a thousand dollars attempting to get similar results from paper ads.  And optimizing your site can give it much a broader exposure.

But there are things you can do on your own to effectively have your web site ranking on the first page if you are willing to put in a little work.

Before you even start to optimize your web site you should think about what keywords you wish to rank for.  You need to review the keyword phrases that potential customers or visitors are using in your market.  The more you can dream up the better.  These can then be put into on-line tools like Google’s keyword research tool or on sites like Wordtracker or Wordze.  These services can give you an estimate on how often these phrases are searched for.  A big number of searches usually equates a potentially large amount of traffic.

Keep in mind that frequently the keyword phrases with the most amount of searches are usually the most competitive also.  That is not to say that you can never rank for them, just that it may take quite a lot of time.  A good strategy is to pick a mix of hard and easy to optimize phrases.  This will help give you a short term and long term focus.

Next you should start to think about the text on your site.  It needs to incorporate the keywords that you are attempting to target but in a natural way.  Never forget that real visitors will be reading your content and it should be created with that in mind.

Don’t stop adding pages to your site.  Every time you create new content you are attracting the search engines to frequently return and reindex your web site.  They can then drive vastly more traffic to your site from many more terms than you started with.

Your last step is by far the most critical and that is your linking strategy.  One of the top factors a search engine uses in determining a site’s ranking is the number of other sites that are pointing to you.  But you should not simply get any site to link to yours.  They should be from sites that are similar to yours.

For example if your site is real estate related site then you will have to have a real estate search engine optimization plan.  This may include getting links from various real estate agent sites, blogs, or anything related to that topic.  You need to be more attentive to quality, rather than quantity.

One of the best ways to do this is with article marketing.  You write information in the form of articles. These can then be posted to different directories for inclusion such as Article Alley.  Your site will receive a link pointing back to it in return for handing out free information.  This is step you should be doing at least once a week.

If you frequently review your keywords phrases, create content and create articles, you will slowly see you rankings and traffic begin to raise.  Over the coming weeks your web site can be your most valuable marketing an business avenues.  It may take some time and effort however it is well worth it.