Using professional SEO services is like using a professional contractor to build a storefront for your business. The way the storefront looks and functions is vital to getting customers who will browse and, eventually, buy.

A professional who is familiar with SEO requirements can help you create a virtual storefront that will do the same thing. Half the battle with creating an online business is simply optimising your website so search engines will find it. Why not hire a professional to help you do this more quickly and efficiently? Here are just a few of the benefits of using a professional service:

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These eight essential SEO techniques will help you build more traffic to your website. They’re the basic ways to help the search engines notice your website so you can be ranked higher for more keywords. They don’t involve playing to every single change a search engine makes. Instead, they’re time-tested, proven ways to steadily gain ranking with search engines so your site gets noticed! (Continue reading…)

Image search engines are exactly what they say on the tin. They’re search engines for images. If you do a search on Google for a particular product or item, you can select to search for images only by clicking the images tab in the top left corner. When you search in this way, you’ll find hundreds of images of the product you’re looking for.

Images also appear in the standard natural search results too, usually just under the first natural search result. For Google, it’s all about relevance and offering information to the end user that’s relevant, for you, it’s another opportunity to get found by your potential customers.

How do you get found in the image results?

The only way to get found in the results pages of the image search engines is to ensure that you’re correctly using ‘ALT’ tags in your code. ‘But I can’t code’, I hear you say, that’s not a problem. You can check whether your ALT tags are correctly labelled by hovering over an image. If an ALT tag is present a little box will appear with some text. This text should clearly describe the content of the image, but more often than not, it will only say ‘image1′, ‘topimage’ or something similar. (Continue reading…)

Last week I talked about the Google keyword search tool and how it can provide you with a customised keyword list for your business, for free. Here, we’ll look at how to interpret that data and use it in your website and online marketing.

With the Google keyword search tool, you can learn several things about potential keywords for your website. By typing in a broad keyword, such as “jewellery”, you can see Google’s suggestions for related keywords. Each keyword will have several pieces of information about it.

For instance, you’ll see a column for competition. This gives you a small bar graph showing how much competition surrounds that keyword. If lots of websites use that particular keyword, the bar graph will be almost green. If not many sites use it, you’ll see more white. Hover over the bar chart and Google will tell you whether the competition is high, medium or low. Your goal is to find and use keywords with lower competition. (Continue reading…)

The Google keyword search tool is a free way to find keywords for your business. This is a simple and easy way to understand what your customers are searching for, rather than you simply selecting what you think your customers are searching for. It will help you ensure your keyword choice is more accurate for your customers and be better for search engine optimisation.

This particular tool allows you find keywords related to your business. So, if you owned a jewellery business, it would give you different jewellery related keywords. The data provided shows you the number of searches in a given month for each of the different generated keywords.

From the results Google gives you from the Google keyword search tool, you can select keywords that are relevant to your business offering, services or products. Your goal when choosing keywords is to pick those that are searched for frequently but that aren’t too competitive. For example, using a keyword such as “jewellery” for the content of a page is unlikely to get you to the top of the search engines. It’s so broad that there is bound to be limitless competition. (Continue reading…)