Are you a small to medium sized business, trying to get more local customers to visit your website and generate that all important extra income, you need to start marketing your website and business in the right way on the internet, you could be missing out on potential visitors that will give you the extra income you require.

If other business competitors in your local area are being found on the search engines, they are potentially steeling your business.

Before I explain about the different ways you can gain extra traffic to your website, I want to explain a couple of regularly mentioned terms.

You need to understand these terms, so you can separate the different areas of marketing your company and website on the internet.

Search Engine Marketing or (SEM) / Search Engine Optimisation or (SEO)

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has nothing to do with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), people often confuse these two terms with each other, they are totally separate. Before I explain about the best ways to get your website and business ranking on the first page of Google for local search terms, you need to make sure you clearly understand the differences between these two phrases.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

This term refers to the different ways used to market and promote your website by increasing it's visibility on the search engine page results. There are many ways you can market your website on the major search engines which range from, Natural Listings, Pay Per Click Advertising and Contextual Advertising.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

This term refers to the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to your website from Search Engines. The ways in which you increase the volume of traffic to your site for your targeted keywords is by optimising the pages on your website for the keyword terms that people would use to find your business or product. Once you have optimised the pages on your website, the search engines will index your pages for these keyword terms.

OK! Now we understand the differences between these two terms I can move on to giving you the knowledge you will need to start promoting your business on the internet for FREE.

Understanding the Market and Search Terms

Remember this article is giving you the knowledge you need to gain extra traffic to your website for 'LOCAL' search terms, it is relatively easy to get your website ranking on the first page of google for these local search terms, for example:

If I was a 'Personal Trainer' and I was situated in 'Wigan', we would optimise our website for the search term, 'Personal Trainers Wigan'. It would be stupid to try and optimise my website for search terms such as 'Personal Trainer', 'Fitness Instructor' as these search terms do not target your local area.

Step 1. Optimise your Homepage

There are several parts of your homepage that need optimising so that the search engines know exactly what is on the page.

Creating the correct title for your Homepage

The first thing we need to do is optimise what is called the '' tag. Using the search term I talked about above our title tag would look like this:

Personal Trainers Wigan, Company Name

You will notice I have included 'Company Name' after 'Personal Trainers Wigan'. This is because the main phrase we want people to find us for has to come first, the 'Company Name' goes after the main search term. This way if people actually search for our 'Company Name' they will also find our website.

Write the correct description for your Homepage

Once your title tag is optimised we need to create the description tag. When we create the description tag make sure you reference your main search term, for example your description tag would look like this:

Company Name, Professional Personal Trainers Wigan. Fully Qualified Personal Trainers and Private Training Facility with fully equipped Personal Training Centre.

You can see we have referenced 'Personal Trainers Wigan' and we have also referenced 'Personal Trainers'. By doing this we are letting the search engine know that the content on this page is what has been searched for.

Adding keywords to your Homepage

The next part of optimising the hompage is to add the correct keywords in the keywords tag, for example this would look like this:

Personal Trainers Wigan, Personal Trainers

There is no point filling the keywords tag with other search terms, search engines do not rank the keywords tag with as much importance as they used to.

Adding the correct Headings and Content

Once we have optimised all the parts of the page that sit in the background, we need to make sure that the content on our page is optimised and set out in the correct way. First we need to make sure that the title of the content is a '' tag, this means that when a search engine looks at the content on the page the first thing it will look at is the '' tag, for example the title of our text on the home page may be:

Personal Trainers Wigan, Company Name No.1 Personal Trainers in Wigan

Once the title of our text has been created we need to make sure that the text on the homepage has the correct weight of keywords in it. The best rule we have found with this is a 6 paragraph article (maximum of 200 words per paragraph), in each paragraph you need to reference your keywords once, no more than twice.

Adding Links to your homepage

The final part of optimising your homepage is to add some 'Self Serving Links' the bottom of your webpage. For example this would look like this:

Personal Trainers Wigan

This acts a link on your website which is targeted at the keyword 'Personal Trainers Wigan'.

Our next article will tell you how to get your business listed on the first page of google using google maps.