Why SEO Is the Lifeblood to Your Website

If you are starting up a small business, one consideration that should have crossed your mind will have been your web presence. This is a crucial aspect of commerce in today’s markets, enabling you to connect with networks of customers, retailers and colleagues anywhere on the planet.

SEO / Search Engine Optimization

In picturing this website, no doubt you’ll have in your mind some fantastic examples you’ve already seen in operation, perhaps involving a lot of graphics and Flash animation?

A note of caution is required at this stage. The so-called front-end of a website might appear to be visually stunning, but unless there’s a solid and viable structure anchoring it in the background, then it is surely doomed to fail.

Without wishing to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm at such an early stage in their entrepreneurial career, statistics consistently reveal 90% of new online businesses fail within the first four months! So what can you do to give your own the best chance of becoming established?

The experts of the affiliate network TopOffers are explaining the key issues you should be aware of when starting a business.

Attract traffic


In order to succeed you need to attract web traffic. It’s as simple as that. But persuading those web users to alight on your pages when there’s another site offering exactly the same material one-click away is much trickier.

The key to harnessing all those potential customers is two-fold. Firstly, you must ensure your content appeals to search engines and will therefore be ranked highly enough that people will find you when searching. Secondly, you have to pay close attention to the ‘meta’ content – the invisible coding behind the actual text that appears in web browsers, in conjunction with keywords that are seeded throughout your visible content. The danger is trying to combine these elements in a clumsy way.

Website Traffic

When you think of your content as being secondary to the meta content behind the scenes, you run the risk of creating ‘thin web pages’ that are crammed with keywords that don’t run organically with the text flow.

How do spiders work?


Search engines send out crawling software or ‘spiders’ to examine your site forensically. In order to appreciate why SEO is so important in terms of raising the profile of your web platform, it’s a good idea to grasp what these spiders are actually looking for when they check out your site before reporting their findings back to the search engine.

When one of these spiders hits your website it instantly reads through your text, the hyperlinks, the meta tags (those keywords not actually inserted into the content but placed in the coding that lies beneath the page) and the code itself.

Once it has sourced a host of this data it can form a profile of your site which then gets ingathered by the search engine. Spiders can get a more accurate picture of the role of your web pages by checking out your hyperlinks to see where they are targetting, and whether or not these links are one-way or reciprocal.

You can see why it’s so important to have fluid and streamlined navigation built into your website. You should conduct periodic site maintenance exercises in order to guarantee none of your links are broken.

Inserting those keywords is of such significance you should take time when building them into your content. A good rule of thumb is to think of an hourglass when placing the relevant words on a web page. Commence with a lot of them within the introductory and opening paragraphs; thin them out a bit more towards the middle chunk of the articles; liberally pepper them throughout the concluding paragraphs.

As you are considering the words to use, simply think of what someone out there might be using to search for your product or subject. What are you providing? In your meta tags you could include common miss-spellings of a given subjects (but not on the visible content obviously.) Which customers are you catering for?

And are your customers local, national or international? It might seem like a painstaking exercise, but there are tools available to assist you in applying SEO.

Important as it is, you shouldn’t focus exclusively on this aspect. Positive web design is still a crucial aspect of the profile the search engines will be compiling about your site.

So take all you enthusiasm and the knowledge you’ve got from this post go ahead and build your website and don’t forget to use TopOffers to monetize it!

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