If you are a small business and havent developed a website yet you are probably considering it, or you should be. If you are selling a product or a service, even if your customers are local then your own website can be a powerful marketing tool. It will only become so if the website is designed correctly, is search engine friendly and most importantly is user friendly. However you might have the greatest looking website ever but it is no good if nobody gets to see it! How do people get to see it? If it appears up there on the first two pages of the search engine then you have a good chance of picking up visitors. The alternative is to do what many larger companies do and that is go the pay per click route. In my experience this can turn out to be an expensive route.

So you have had your website developed now it must be promoted to make it search engine friendly and shoot up the rankings. How can you achieve that? You can do it yourself! There is ample free advice out there on the Web that tells you exactly what you need to do; a simple search will reveal all the information you need. Basically it consists of three things;

1. Add good content to your site
2. Develop links to your site
3. Update your site frequently

Okay so you are the expert in your field so adding good content linked to your keywords is no problem. Takes time and if you havent personally designed your site it might require you to embark on a steep learning curve. Otherwise pass the information over to your web designer. This ties in with number 3 on the list, updating your information regularly. By doing so you are adding more content and the more often your site content changes then the more frequently the search engine spiders will visit your site and the higher your ranking should be. I would recommend changing it on at least a once per week basis. Not of course your whole website but parts of it should be added to each week. Again takes time and a little knowledge of how your website works and how to update information on it.

Developing links to your site is probably the most time consuming activity of all. They are important. The more backward links you have the higher your placement in the search engines will be, so long as they are relevant links. Relevant links are ones that point back to your site from other sites with similar content to your own. So for example if you are a contract cleaner then a link back from an equipment or product supplier would be considered relevant, from a photographic studio would not be. Consequently you can go searching for sites that you might be able to link to and ask them. You could join a reciprocal links programme and not be certain of the type of links you are generating. Or you could pay an expert to develop the links for you!

A second way of developing good links is to write articles and submit them to the article distributors and e-zines. Again excellent for the links, driving customers to your website and spreading your own reputation across the Web. Again an amazingly time consuming activity.

A third way is to develop a weblog alongside your website. Excellent for ever changing and additional content and for getting links. It does require constant updating though, daily if possible!

So what does this all add up to? A huge investment of your time, when you should be concentrating on your business. So you do it in the evenings and end up with no social life and possibly no family!

I have been through this process of designing and developing the website and then promoting it to the point were it is ranked very highly on all the search engines for our keywords and also for some that are not! However the time it has taken up is immense and is ongoing because you cannot sit back and relax having achieved your high rankings because your competitors will eventually displace you. So I would strongly advise you, if you have the necessary resources, to invest in a good web design team who will also promote your website as an ongoing entity over time. If you have the money and choose your SEO experts wisely then it will be money well spent. Unfortunately at the time we were doing it we didnt have the resources so it was a case of do it yourself or not at all, and over the course of the last two years I have learnt to become reasonably expert so see no need to employ somebody else to do it now.