These, in my opinion, are the basics for ensuring your website is capable of performing well for you in the search engines and in converting visits to enquiries or orders. Once you have attended to your SEO your website content, you can then consider adwords, affiliates, etc. to boost performance further.

Key Phrases

Key phrases are the phrases potential customers will use in order to find you and so are crucial in SEO. The first move in SEO is to draw up a list of all the key phrases that searchers might use to find the products or services you are providing. It’s important that whatever you are promoting or talking about within your site will be optimised for the search engines.

Website Content

Furthermore, the content of every page needs to be optimised not only for the search engines but also for enquiries/sales. All too often the written content of a website is left to the website developers, none of whom have actually been involved with writing sales or direct response copy. It can be rather like a ship builder writing the promotional material for a cruise liner he’s just helped to build!

The written content is therefore of paramount importance for both search engine and direct response optimisation. This often means that the content of an existing site has to be edited and in some cases re-written. If your website is an online shop, then the written content becomes absolutely critical, especially when you need to persuade browsers to buy from you rather than someone else.

Your website needs to SELL.

Website Navigation

It goes without saying that navigating through the site has to be really easy, especially when visitors will be arriving at any page, not necessarily the Home page. If there’s anything specific that you’re promoting on the Home page, you need to link to those promotions from every other page, if possible. Never assume that everyone who visits your site visits the Home page.

Encourage Response

Make it easy for browsers to contact you. Why make them find your Contact Us page when you could have a phone number on every page as well as an Enquiries link?

Links

Create as many inbound links as possible. Ask all your suppliers if they’ll agree to adding a link to your site from their sites.

Links from page to page within your website should be, where possible, key phrases.

Website Analysis

You ought to be monitoring the performance of your website frequently. For instance, when traffic to your website starts to increase, you need to know what the ‘bounce rate’ is, i.e. how many visitors have arrived at your site and left it immediately without looking around. A high bounce rate would indicate, perhaps, that the content could be improved or that the search phrases you have selected do not accurately reflect the services/products you are providing.

Another example: if you are an online retailer, you need to know how many people who click the Buy Now or Add to Basket links actually fail to proceed to purchase. The fall-out can be as high as 70%!

I would recommend you subscribe to Google Analytics and it’s FREE!

Website Management

Most importantly, you need to be managing your website effectively. It needs to be updated regularly to keep it optimised. A site that never changes is visited less and less frequently and so loses its search engine profile.

More importantly, you need to be giving your visitors good reason to return.

Email Marketing

Your website must encourage visitors to register for something. The most obvious is a Newsletter than contains information that will be of interest to your visitors. However, it could also be some sort of competition or a relevant offer of some sort. Most importantly, you will be building a database of prospective and existing customers who can be emailed whenever you feel the need.