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How to start a low-risk web business

Posted on 14 Apr 2009 at 11:01

Attracting the search engines

Setting up a website isn't even half the battle - the hard part is drawing people to your new site. Marketing, word-of-mouth and PR will all pull visitors to your site, but attracting the attention of the search engines is critical to the success of most web businesses. And when it comes to search engines, there really is only one player in town. Google accounts for more than 90% of the searches that take place in the UK, according to the latest figures from analytics firm Hitwise, which means you should focus your energy on improving your Google rank, and treat success on Yahoo, Live.com and any other search engines as an added bonus.

Google offers plenty of advice on search engine optimisation on its website (www.pcpro.co.uk/links/175syob2), including a PDF starter guide that's essential reading before you start designing the structure and content of your website.

There are some fundamentals to getting your site noticed by Google's spiders. First, submit both your URL and sitemap to Google (at www.google.com/submit_content.html) and the other search engines, so that they know your site exists and how it's structured.

Companies that rely on regional business, particularly tradesman, should make sure they're registered in the Local Business Centre (also found on the submit content site mentioned previously). This allows you to list your company name, address, brief description and even create basic promotional materials. This ensures your site is listed on Google Maps, so that when someone searches for, say, "Croydon plumber", your business appears on the map and listings that appear at the top of the main Google search page.

Much of the good practice for on-page SEO - the techniques you can apply on the web pages themselves - boils down to common sense. If the site is cleanly laid out and easily understood by human visitors, the search engine will have no problem. Pages should be clearly titled, with the title tag appearing within the head tag of the HTML, and each page uniquely titled.

If you're selling goods on your site, you should give each product its own separate page. This allows you to get the product name in the title tag of the page, making it more likely that Google will rank the page when people search for that particular product name. Note the way sites such as Amazon do this, with the name of the product also appearing in the page's unique URL. Not only does this make the URL more digestible for visitors, but Google will bold the part of the URL that contains the searched-for keywords, making it more likely your site will stand out in a long list of search results (type "U2 achtung baby" into Google to see an example).

Also pay attention to the description metatags on your site. This gives you the opportunity to provide a brief description of what the content of the page is about, and is often what will appear in the two lines of text beneath the page's title on Google. You've got only 160 characters, so make sure the text between your description tags is concise and contains the keywords that describe that page. Keyword tags are important, although not the much-abused shortcut to search-engine success they once were.

Off-page SEO is all about encouraging other sites to link to your own. The more authoritative the site that links to you, the better, although trying to convince the BBC or The Guardian to write about and link to your small business isn't exactly easy. Here it can pay to be creative: an entertaining blog that displays your expertise can not only gain a loyal readership, but attract links and drive traffic to your website.