Guest post from Cedric Chambaz , Marketing Manager, Search & SMB, Microsoft Advertising
You have a website and you promote it on your business cards, in your email signature, on your product? Great! You have the basics covered, but is this really enough?
50% of the UK computers have their default homepage set on a search engine, which indicates that consumers start their online journey with a search engine. They go to Bing, Yahoo or Google and enter a few keywords in the search box, and expect that the algorithm to point them in the right direction.
So if someone searches for your company, your products or services, how to be sure that you show up prominently in the results page?
In a previous article I explained how Small and Medium Businesses can leverage pay-per-click advertising to capture this traffic by displaying an ad on top of the search results. Another search technique consists in improving how your site appears in the non-paid for search results, or ‘organic results’: this is what people refer to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Microsoft has released a free SEO toolkit that can help you improve how search engines see, index and point to your site. The free toolkit essentially works like a search engine would: it processes your site in a similar manner and provides a report of the items and potential solutions to optimize a sites organic search results (regardless of search engine). Run the tool and you will get a ton of suggestions (from quick wins to more sophisticated improvements) about what you should do to maximise click-through.
The benefits are quite straightforward:
Have a go at this free Search Engine Optimisation toolkit, and you will get a sense of how search engines are seeing your site.