Access to your website is primarily through the search engines. Therefore, your site needs to be found by the top search engines such as Yahoo and Google. These search engines can be your best ally in generating internet traffic. As well as leading to more sales, it provides free advertising of your business or service.

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the technique of making your website rank highly in search engine databases according to the relevance to the user’s search. To be successful in the search engines, you need to have articles and keywords based on the words that users look for on the search engines.

It is important to submit your site to the main search engines. When you do this, you need to use optimised keywords to increase your ranking. This is particularly so in a highly competitive industry. By doing so, you will attract more potential buyers to your site.

When optimising your website, it pays to bear in mind that text is what the search engines take notice of, not graphics. It is therefore imperative that you have good written content on your site.

A good investment if you’re serious about search engine optimisation is software that helps you determine the most searched for keywords in your industry. This will let you focus on optimising your website with the most relevant keywords.

Another area of focus is the text on your home page as this is the first thing search engines read. In the opening paragraph, use as many keywords and key phrases as possible. Also, your website ranking will be better if your HTML tags are consistent with your text.

Do some research to find the right search engine for your business needs but certainly don’t overlook the big three, which is Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These will be crucial to your marketing efforts.

When submitting your website to search engines, consider these important things:

1. Does the search engine generator give updates?

2. Does the registration process let you include your purpose?

To give more chance of potential customers finding you easily, you should register your website with as many search engines as you can.

Search engines use a program called a spider that browses the internet and looks for web pages that have been visited. If you overuse keywords, this spider may bypass your site and it won’t be included in search results. It is known as keyword abuse so it is important to get the balance right.

Some websites also don’t use their listed keywords in their content and therefore the spider doesn’t acknowledge it. This means your web page won’t be indexed. It is therefore a waste of your time coming up with lots of irrelevant keywords just to have your website overlooked by the search engines. Remember, keep it relevant to what your site is about.

One of the main objectives for your online business is building up a database of customers and potential customers. If your website delivers on its promises, you will begin to get repeat customers which are the backbone of your business. To do this well, you need to communicate with these customers and potential customers using some or all of the following:

• Affiliate programs

• Newsletters

• Banner ads

• Discussion groups and forums

Your data should consist of information collected through previous sales, customer communications and email lists. There are several sources of useful and relevant data to build a successful customer database including:

• customer order forms

• warranty card information

• servicing information

• records of returned products

• questionnaires filled out at time of purchase

Use this information to ascertain what it is that your customers want to see and hear. After getting to know as much as possible about these customers and potential customers, you can correspond with them much more effectively.