The best functioning website in the world will always fail if no one on the internet can find it. This is the reason why website owners work so hard at optimising their sites. A website must be created in a certain way to make it easily indexed and ranked by search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and Google. Being ranked well means being on the first page of results for any given search term in the local region. This is crucial to getting large volumes of traffic to a website, as the sites on later pages of results will struggle to be found by web users.

There are various actions which must be taken to effectively optimise a website. The most important of these will be the inclusion of unique content which is relevant to the topic of the site. This means that it cannot rank highly in search results, as Google’s algorithm automatically reduces the ranking of sites whose content can be found elsewhere. Any sizeable piece of text on a website should include at least some relevant keywords and keyword phrases. This original content should also have your keywords embedded within it, however this has to be natural mentioning of the keywords as opposed to stuffing. When looking at on-page elements of search engine optimisation (SEO) then many would argue that the title tag is one of the most important elements. Another influential factor is the header tag for each page of the site. Also of great importance to a website’s ranking is its meta tags, which will include the keywords and a description of the site to allow it to be indexed by the search engines.

Small businesses rate webpage is crucial to the success of the sites of individuals and small businesses, as they would not otherwise by able to compete with larger companies. They have neither the advertising budget nor the customer base of their larger competitors. As optimisation is about quality rather than budget, this allows many smaller and less financially well off companies to compete on a similar level. There is no chance of them being able to challenge either financially or in terms of numbers of customers. Their only means of competing is to optimise their website to the point where it is very visible to people surfing the internet. Once they get visitors to the site they can then use this opportunity to build a customer base.

Despite their dominance, large corporations still understand the importance of having the top placing in search results. One evident case of this obvious manipulation was when German car manufacturer BMW were found altering results for the search term “used cars”. The had set up a series of doorway pages which contained keyword rich links back to their main dealership website. The attempt actually had the opposite effect as it was found out by Google and they then enforced a penalty on the BMW website. This was detrimental, but worse was to follow, as after this action when searching for the car manufacturer’s very recognisable brand name in other countries the top results would be for pages reporting the story, as opposed to BMW’s own national websites.

It can be seen therefore that website optimisation is important for large and small businesses, although in the latter case it is depended upon more heavily for driving traffic to a website. As a result, smaller businesses must have a proven successful optimising strategy. They do this by making sure that they rank highly for very specific keyword phrases, rather than by fruitlessly trying to compete with the larger businesses on broad search terms. This is what is known as long-tail keyword marketing, and is invaluable as a method of driving traffic to the websites of smaller businesses. This method is effective for attracting a small amount of customers, but you must ensure you offer quality content that makes the visitors return. A unique and memorable website will be the most effect way for a small business to compete with their larger rivals.

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