Thinking "out of the box"

Yes, I know it's one of those awful management buzzwords, but in this case it accurately describes the process you need to go through to get the most from search engines. 99% of websites simply talk about their product or service. That's fine if you are selling something unusual, you will naturally get a high listing because there are not many other websites describing that item.

As an example type "17th century coins" (with the quotes) into Google. You'll get about 34 entries. Now type in "telephone answering service" - you'll get about 34 thousand entries!

So, if you are providing a telephone answering service, or some other commodity product or service, how on earth do you get anywhere near the top? You can pay for an advert, but this will cost you money.

The trick is to include related content on your website that your potential customers will also be interested in.

Many small businesses use BT's call minder service. This service will divert incoming calls to another phone or to an answering machine if the line is busy. These people are very likely to want a "real person" telephone answering service, even though they may not know that such a service even exists.

Type "using bt call minder" or "setting up bt call minder" into Google (with the quotes). How many listings? Last time we looked it was zero, so if your website includes one of these phrases you will be the only listing! If the user does not put the phrase in quotes Google will still respond with only a few hundred entries and if your website includes the exact phrase you will be near or at the top.

Here's another one. "starting a business in the uk" produces only about 70 entries, but business startups are prime targets for telephone answering services.

Don't think you can just "spam" the search engines (see below) by putting lots of unconnected phrases in your website. Search engines are very clever in being able to spot this sort of tactic. Anyway, when someone clicks on your link they will expect to see some useful information relating to the phrase they seached for, if they don't get it they will hit the back button.

To summarise - don't just focus on what you have to sell, get into the mindset of people who are likely to need your service but are actually looking for something else. It makes your website more interesting to your visitors, gets you many more visitors - and it's fun too.