How keywords attract customers to your website

It is critical for small businesses to have a website, but building a site is only half the battle. You must also attract customers.

One way to draw customers is to have a high listing on search engines. You want your site to appear in the first few results when potential customers do web searches related to your business. Optimising your website for your keywords is the best use of your time and money, heres how:

Which keywords?
Keywords are the search terms customers use to find you. Getting a high listing with popular keywords is difficult because there's a lot of competition for them, instead choose narrow, focused search terms.
For suggestions on keywords try Yahoo's overture tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

Use product type, people search by product type rather than brand so if you are selling Masport lawnmowers use lawnmowers rather than Masport in your keywords.

Try location, you may want to optimise by location. If you sell lawnmowers locally then use "wellington lawnmowers" as your keywords

Using your keywords
Use your keywords in your page text. Don’t go overboard, remember people will be reading the page along with search engines. Keywords placed in the following locations on your page are given emphasis by search engines

• the title meta-tag
• description meta-tag
• -h1- page heading
• the first paragraph
• headings
• bullet points
• the last paragraph
  

Monitor how you are doing on the search engines and be patient as it can take a few months to see results. You will need to keep tweaking your website because search engines change their algorithms and as other webpages get higher rankings yours will be pushed down.

Try these simple things on your website and see your website listing soar!