What is SEO

SEO or search engine optimization, is not any one thing, it is a variety different techniques that help make a website rank highly in search engines Search Results.

SEO makes your website or web pages findable in Search Engines

The very best way to make your website rank well in search engines, is to get a lot of links from other websites that have a similar theme to your website, and links from pages that have a good pagerank of their own. Simply having a link from a site, if the page the link to your site is on is has no PR rank in Google won’t help your page rank at all, unless you have many thousand such links. The trick is to get links to your website rather than from your website.

Page Rank or PR is a rating Google gives to every page on the internet, many pages have a PR0 and very few have the top PR which is PR10. Even the Google search page ranges from PR7 – PR10.

The best way to do this is to write articles and submit them to these other websites. Websites that take articles from writers, usually offer a link to your website from your article, so readers can visit your website if they wish.

If you have a website for your business, chances are you are an expert on your particular type of business. You may not know you are an expert, or even think you are, but you have experience that can be shared with others, and your particular experience and the way you write about it can only be done by you.

For example if you are a screen printer, you and your family have been screen printers for say 50 years, your father was a screen printer, and your teenage daughter is now learning the trade. You have hundreds even thousands of topics you can write about. How screen printing has changed with the invent of the computer, how your business has grown over the years, what products you use and why, what techniques you have adapted to suit your clients needs, which types of ink work best with which types of materials… the list goes on and on.

All you need to do, is write about 20 articles, only one page long, approx 600 words, find suitable websites to submit them to, as many websites as you can find, the more different sites the better. If your articles are accepted you will notice over the next year or so, that your website get a better google pagerank, and therefore will do better in search engines results.

You can also join forums that specifically relate to your business, often these forums allow you to have live links within your signature that you can make links to your own website, then make and reply to as many of posts as you can.

Or another way to get these live one way links to your website, is to pay for an advertising space on a website, the advert doesn’t have to be a big, whats most important though that the link goes to your website, this can be very expensive, but you will get links back to your website, which is the object of the exercise.

This may sound all very easy, but there is one other consideration. The text in the link, with a link you can either have a image or text that are the link to your website, the actual words in the text are important, simply having the name of your website isn’t desirable, the very best text are words that you optimized your website for, your websites keywords.

If you have the same screen printers website, you have probably decided that the words Screen Printer and the area you live in, or will do work in would be desirable keywords, so your ideal keywords would be Screen Printer Christchurch or maybe you specialize in small runs of screen printing, so your linking text could be "Small Run Screen Printer"

If you don’t have the time or the inclination to become a writer, or can’t afford to pay for advertisements, you have the option of hiring someone to do some of the SEO work for your website. I wouldn’t suggest you do it yourself, if time is your issue, either the time to do it, or the time it will take to for your work to make a difference.

Doing your own SEO is a full on job, search engines are always changing the way they rank websites, and as more websites are built, and are optimized, you will need to change your techniques to stay ahead of the opposition.

In saying that if you use the techniques I have outlined here, you will only ever have to keep adding to the back links you have already established, so if some sites close you will have to other links already in place.

When mentioning the problem above, of a site closing or perhaps pruning their content and you losing your precious back links, it’s not a good idea to have too many articles you have written or forum posts on the same site, be sure to spread yourself around.

Lynn Bishop: Lynn specializes in content writing for web pages both those designed and built by her business, or just websites in general, She also writes the wording for brochures and booklets and press releases. She is head of SEO for her online Business Canz Design so is skilled at writing not only interesting content, but content that attracts search engines to a website.

Read More at Canz’s specialized SEO Services