Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization refers to the steps adopted in order to ensure that your site ranks well up high on the search engine results. This is one of the most effective ways of growing your business. Over the years, we've earned so much revenue through enquiries that come from people who have landed up on our website after searching for various keywords related to our business.

Now, I do not claim to be an expert at search engine optimization, and I do not want to talk about all the possible ways adopted by various companies to manipulate search engine results, as these can result in the site being blacklisted. This happened in the famous case of the website of BMW Germany, where Google felt it's acceptable terms and conditions of usage were being violated, and consequently reduced the site's page rank to zero.

So here are some quick tips to get you started, and hopefully none of these fall foul of Google's rules, or else my AdSense revenues will go away completely - not that they exist in any case!

1. Identify your keywords: These are the search terms you think your prospective clients may be searching for. For instance, for a company offering online gifts or flowers to be delivered in India, some of the terms that its prospective customers might use would be "deliver flowers India", "deliver gifts online India", or even specific cities, such as "deliver flowers Delhi".
2. Put them in the title: Although, some people claim that it is the "meta" tags in the tags of your web page that search engines pick up, I have found putting these words in the Title tags to be most effective
3. Increase your page rank: Google has the world-famous page-ranking mechanism, whereby a number of factors are used to decide the relevance of your page to the search terms being entered. One of the most effective ways to do this is to have other pages with high page ranks link to you. While, most of you might have received link-exchange emails, I don't think these work. What has worked for us is usually publishing good content - such as articles, interviews, tools, etc. - on sites that are linked to our area of work, and that are very highly ranked by Google. So you first have to identify these websites - which could be online publications related to your business, or online newspaper or magazine websites, etc. Then you have to figure out how to get links onto their webpages that point back to your website. We've usually done this by writing articles. In fact, in our company everyone is very strongly encouraged to write relevant articles, for various reasons among which is the fact that it increases our search engine ratings.
4. Get good content: This is a no-brainer. Your website definitely needs to have really good content - now just blatant advertisements, but stuff that clients might actually find useful. For those articles, that online magazines might not accept, we usually upload them to our website under a title called "Innovation". This section contains tools, articles, and other assorted stuff that search engine spides crawl, index, and serve up when people search for subject-specific content.
5. Use your common sense: Don't get drawn into link exchange programs, or try to do things that violate search engine terms or manipulate how they work. Follow the straight path, and it might take a few months, but as your website starts climbing up the results page, the business will follow suit quickly!

Here are some other cool links to help you along in the search engine ratings:
1. SEO tips From Microsoft!
2. SEO Chat Search Engine Optimization Help
3. Nice introduction to SEO
4. Search Engine Journal - everyday stuff on SEO and search engines