Writing for the Search Engines

Last week I went to a free lecture called "Writing for the Search Engines", held by a company specialising in search engine optimization. It discussed how to get your web page higher in the Google search results. I thought I'd share the main points, as I found them to be fairly straight forward and good to keep in mind for all of us who sell online.

• Research your keywords

What words are relevant to what you sell? Which keywords do internet users search for? There are free online tools for this, for example the Google Keyword Analysis tool that you can find at http://adwords.google.com/

• Try it out

Try different keywords to see what works!

• Analyze!

Register for Google Analytics to analyse the results.

When you know what your most important keywords are, use them on your web page. In the URL (if possible), in the page title, in the text. If you sell pendants, your page title (the part that’s visible in the title bar of the browser) shouldn’t be "Welcome to my page" – it should, however, contain the word "Pendants"! It’s also a good idea to have the important keywords in internal links – for example "Our handmade pendants" instead of "Our products".

This is just a very short summary, but I hope these tips can be of some help to you in your online business!