So hopefully you now have your website up and running. Your next question should be how to get people to visit your site.

There are basically two ways to raise your site’s visibility online: organically or by methods you pay for.

Organic Searches
By ‘organic’ I mean what naturally happens when someone types keywords into their search engine such as “electricians in Gloucester”. Hopefully, if you are indeed an electrician in Gloucester, then your website will appear in the list of results. The higher your site appears in the list the more likely it is that people will visit and this in turn should push it further up the list.

One key factor to help increase your profile is search engine optimisation (SEO). There is no simple way of increasing your SEO, unfortunately. Then again if there was then everyone would be doing it.

One thing that will help will be relevant, thoroughly researched and well written copy for your website. Knowing what meta tags and meta descriptions are and how to write them will also be a big help.

Paid Searches
This basically means paying someone to advertise your site. An example is setting up a Google AdWords account with which you only pay a fee if somebody clicks on your ad. If you choose this method you will need carefully targeted adverts so that you attract the right customers and clicks that actually turn into business for you. You also need to use the location setting so that your advert appeals to people in the right area for your business.

Next month I’ll take a quick look at Online Listing Sites.