How well is your website performing? Are you satisfied with the amount of customers who view your website? Do you get enough business through your website? By reading this article you will be in a position to do something about all three questions.
It's all very well having a nicely designed and appealing website for your business but it's of no use if you don't get the customers to visit it. The number one term you will find associated with this is search engine optimisation. You will find endless sources on the Internet telling you to optimise this and optimise that but what does it all mean?
Search engine optimisation simply means making your website as friendly to search engines as possible. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN provide your business with the ability to reach a huge amount of customer's, they are by far the most successful method to boost sales for your business. If your website is nicely optimised then you will have a greater chance of appearing higher up on the search engines.
Most customers will type in a phrase into the search engine and view the first couple of websites that it finds, they will usually be successful in finding what they were looking for on the first page of results. Statistics show that customers very rarely look further than the first page (90% don't look past the first page) so what good is it if your website was on page 10? This is where search engine optimisation comes in, it will give your business a greater chance of being on that first golden page in the search engines.
There are many methods that all contribute to a higher ranking but some are more influential than others. The first factor is having a well built website. This is a standard feature that all website design companies should offer.
The second method is keywords. Keywords are the words that are associated with your business, the idea is to include these words in your website so when a customer types in a phrase in a search engine, your website is more likely to appear. Keywords should be chosen carefully to target the correct market for your business. It's no good targeting the word "Fruit" if your business sells website design.
The third factor that contributes to a high search engine ranking is back links. This simply means a link from someone else's website to yours. The more links you have to your website the better. Search engines view your back links as a sign of popularity and obviously the more popular you are the more successful you appear. One of the best methods for this is to submit your website to online directories, not only will you get a back link but you are also likely to get a lot of customers coming to your website from that link. Make sure that you select trusted directories and one's that can relate to your business, there is a chance that you will get penalised by search engines if you sign up to link farms (websites that collect lot's of spam and poor quality links).
Finally, having a website that is constantly updated also gives you a boost in terms of search engines as they like to see fresh content. This is also likely to draw customers back to your website as they know they are likely to see something new. This in turn will boost the amount of traffic you get to your website which will also help in gaining a higher search engine rank.
These are just some of the methods in which you can improve your website performance, there are many other factors that contribute to a high search engine ranking. Most are an on-going process so it is very beneficial to your business to continually try to improve your performance as there is always someone competing against you for that top spot.

Many people have been asking me this very question, how do i market my website online? Well there are many answers and in this post I am going to explain some of the most popular old and new ways to market your website online.

Write Articles/Blog
Setup a blog or write articles and publish them the article houses such as ezinearticles and more. By writing articles on topics of your services or products this can help achieve some pretty good rankings in the search engines. Make sure you are using your keywords in your title of the article and also inside the body as well. The more articles you write the better your chances are of your website getting found online. This also creates credibility branding for your website.

Twitter
This goes along with writing articles. Twitter is a social engine that people use to post articles or just keep abreast of what the user is doing at a particular time. There is a great tool that connects your RSS blog to twitter automatically. This tool is called http://www.twitterfeed.com. By using this FREE tool every time you post an article to your blog it automatically gets posted to twitter as well. Its a great little tool and automates the blogging process.


Link Building
Link building is still the most popular way to market and increase your ranks in the search engines. The more inbound links you acquire to your website the higher achieved rank you will get.  There are numerous ways to increase link popularity. One way is to simply type your main keyword into a search engine and whatever sites pop up simply ask them to trade a link. Explain to the webmaster that by having a link on both your site and theirs can benefit both parties. Another way to increase link popularity is to use an article submitter. In the first section we spoke about articles and how this helps increase your popularity. This also can help increase your link popularity as well. By using an article submitter such as http://www.articlemarketer.com , you can include a link with your keyword in the title back to your website. This article marketer submits your articles to thousands of different article houses, in turn you increase your link popularity thousand fold!


Submit Your Site to Trade Organization Sites and Specialized Directories.
Some directories are based on particular industries, such as education or finance. You probably belong to various trade associations that feature member directories. Ask for a link. Even if you have to pay something for a link from the organization, it may help boost your PageRank.

Marginal directories, however, come and go very quickly, making it hard to keep up, so don’t try to be exhaustive here. Beware of directories that solicit you for “upgraded listings.” Unless a directory is widely used in your field, a premium ad is a waste of money — but the (free) link itself will help boost your PageRank and hence your search engine ranking.

SubmitWolf (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/submitwolf.htm) is a directory submission tool I’ve used with good success . You complete a listing form in the software interface. Then they submit your listing to all the appropriate directories they know of, plus links to sites that require manual submission. It’s a time saver and works well. Just be careful to submit only to actual directories, not “linking sites.”

There are many more ways to market your business online. In the next article i will list some of the best FREE ways to market your website!