We bit the bullet and removed our company name from our homepage title to make room for additional keywords. What’s more important, having your company name in big bold letters, or being higher up the search results than your competitors? By making sure your company name appears in the descriptive text, your listing is still branded.

For more SEO tips read our Guide to Search Engine Optimisation and subscribe via RSS or email.

The old ‘tricks’ don’t work anymore. That specialised expertise is no longer applicable. You really could do it yourself. Google strive to deliver the most pertinent and accurate results to their users, so if you have a great website, with great content, it will naturally find it’s rightful place in the search rankings. Of course there are still many things that can be done to help it on it’s way, read our Guide to Search Engine Optimisation.

Anyone can set up a blog and start barking away about anything they please, but to understand how you can monetise your blog, you have to first understand how Google works, Search Engine Optimisation, and the concept of Inbound Marketing.

Big companies are on top of this and willing to pay bloggers for placing articles or product reviews (which are basically just links to their website) on their blog. This equates to valuable Inbound Marketing, SEO points, and ultimately to selling more products.

If your blog generates a lot of interest from Joe Public (ie. traffic), your rates go up. Related businesses will want to buy advertising space hoping to reel in punters, and if it’s very successful, you may even have the option of selling the entire blog on.

So is it feasible that you or I could make a decent living as a blogger? Well the answer is yes – if you know what you’re doing… To find out more, read our related posts and download the ebook that details our findings: How To Monetise Your Blog.

There are several hundred million searches on Google every day. Sure a lot of these people are killing time, plagiarising and trawling for porn, but a fair percentage are searching for a product or service – actually looking to spend money or do business.

Simply put, Inbound Marketing is the art and science of ‘getting found’. See our related posts and our Guide to Search Engine Optimisation for tips on how to get your business found on the Internet using Google, blogging and social media.

In essence you need to make your site appear to be among the most important and relevant sources of information on whatever the user is searching for.

KEYWORDS & PHRASES – Establish what these are for your organisation and make sure they appear, legitimately, as often as possible on your website; in the domain name, the directory names, the file names, the page titles, the links, the headings and in the body copy, using the ‘heading’ and ‘strong’ HTML tags to emphasise them to the search engines. Create links from keywords in your copy to other relevant pages on your website.

BUILD INCOMING LINKS – This is probably the single most important thing to do. Get other websites linking to yours. The more the better, and the higher the ranking of the site linking to you, the more weight it has in helping your own. Industry specific directories are a good place to start. High Page Rank sites if possible. Create a Yahoo, Google and MSN account.

INCREASE TRAFFIC – Anything you can think of to drive traffic to your site will help to increase your search ranking. Run on and offline promotions (competitions, prize draws, mailing lists, newsletters, press releases, news articles, etc). In a competitive market, consider an ‘AdWords’ campaign to help kick-start a new website on Google.

SOCIAL NETWORKING – Make use of social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook to promote your business. These are massively popular sites  and click-thrus will help to increase traffic to your website. Facebook offer demographic targeted ad campaigns that promote your website to a relevant audience. Submit your best content on the social booking sites.

TRAFFIC ANALYSIS – Use website stats software such as ‘Google Analytics’ to monitor your website’s traffic and use this information to measure the effectiveness and to fine-tune your campaigns and keywords.

UPDATE & ADD TO YOUR WEBSITE – Adding more pages to your website increases the amount of information available, the strength of your key words, and your site’s perceived value compared to competitor websites with less content or content that doesn’t change. Google loves original content. Avoid replicating content.

BLOG – Blogs have a host of built-in tools that facilitate networking, link building, and delivering your information to interested parties. Great for building your SEO infrastructure. Set up a blog, update it as often as you can, and comment on other people’s posts – every comment is a link to your website.

PROMOTE & PING UPDATES – Same rules apply to your blog. List it in the blog directories. Each time you update your blog, use one of the ‘ping’ services to notify the blog directories and search engines of the new content. Promote through your social network.

SEO CONSULTANTS – Employ a good website designer or SEO consultant, they’ll be able to use their time, knowledge and resources to help promote your website to maximum effect, while you concentrate on running your business.