Almost all businesses now days have to have a web site. Even if you don’t sell over the web, your customers will expect to be able to find you on it.

If they know your name and it’s fairly unique then you are likely to be found. That’s good, you can give your customers contact details, support information and reassure them that you have a web presence.

But what if you not only want to be found by people that know you, but also by new customers? Then you have to be found by the type of product or service that you sell. These in web terms are keywords.

Given that all of your competitors also want to be found for those terms, it’s not easy to get to the first page of Google (hardly anyone looks beyond the first page).

If, like me, you get continued spam from people claiming that they can get you on that first page, you’ll be pretty jaded by now. There are some good SEO (search engine optimisation) companies out there but they are difficult to identify from the poor ones and do tend to charge quite a bit.

Also, the good companies do not send out spam, I’d never respond to unsolicited SEO mails, but actually SEO is something that you can take control of yourself.

We used a tool that we down-loaded, it looked at the top ten websites for our keywords and worked out what it was that made those particular sites rank higher than others. We then altered our site to match the recommendations.

All the recent spam I’ve had on SEO reminded me that we’ve had questions on this before and have written a resource on the subject (along with a plug for the tool we used – well worth getting !). Have a look at How to get people to your business web site