Most businesses these days have a website and are aware it's importance as a businss tool and for driving customers to their door. But how do you get visitors to come to your website in the first place?

One answer lies in making sure that your website appears high in the list on search engines when customers search for the products or services you sell.

Try asking your customers which words they would put into Google if they were looking for your product of service.  These should become your “key words”.  Try putting these words into Google yourself and see where you come up.  The goal is to get onto page 1 of the results, since not many folk will look beyond page 1.

Not on page 1?  Don’t panic, there are a few simple (cheap) things you can do that will usually make a big difference.

1.  First Job!  Google loves lots of rich relevant content!  So make sure you have lots of words on your pages, not just photos.  Make sure your “keywords” crop up regularly in the text (but don’t over do it).  Obviously, provide good descriptions of your products and services, but also consider adding regular news updates or better still, add a “Blog” to your site.

2.  Another quick thing to do is to make sure your key words are in the “title” of your web pages.  The “title” is the (usually) blue bar that runs across the top of your browser (e.g. Internet Explorer) when you look at your website.  Adding titles is a ten minute job for your website designer.  Each page of your website should have its own unique title which should tell the user (and Google!) what the page is about.

3.  Your long term goal should be to get as many other people as you can to put links on their websites to your website.  Ideally these linking sites need to be “relevant” – i.e. should be about similar subjects. Here’s one way to get good links – visit other people’s blog sites and leave a comment.  Often you get the chance to leave a link to your own website.

You’d be amazed at what a big difference a few good links can make! Don’t expect your site to rise to the top straight away, the changes you make can take days, weeks or if your site is new, months to take effect.

4.  Last Tip – and this one won’t cost you a penny.  Use Google Analytics to track who is looking at your site.  This gives you a pile of useful information to track who is visiting your site, which pages are most popular etc, even which site they were on before they came to you. This is valuable marketing information that can help make your website a powerful tool for your business. See http://www.google.co.uk/analytics/en-GB/ for more information.

Still not enough visitors?  Think about a Google Adwords Campaign to drive traffic to your site.  This need not cost much because you set a limit for how much you decide to spend per month or even per day. You only pay for the people who click through to visit your site. See http://adwords.google.com for more information.