The simplest SEO formula - it still works!

Whenever I speak with any budding entrepreneur, I cannot help but stress the importance of search engine optimization. Over half our business comes through enquiries generated through our website. In fact, in the first four years we never had a dedicated sales/marketing team, and still managed to earn 6-figure revenues through consulting.

About a year ago, we shifted our domain from a .co.in to a .com. And also changed our branding to reflect our global aspirations. As a result, all the SEO that we had done on our original domain came to naught. Our Google page ranks for the new website were less than 3 on most pages, and our website was simply not turning up in search engine results. So obviously, business enquiries almost suddenly dropped. We took it up on priority to boost our page ranks and get back to the levels we were on with the previous domain. And from that emerged vindication that our SEO formula still works, and is as simple as this:

• Build a nicely designed website - everything is logically structured and your services, products and company profile are well presented
• Add good content to the website. Ours carries a lot of articles that our team writes, and a couple of blogs
• Identify the keywords that you think potential customers would search for
• Add these into your title and meta tags
• And the key to it all - have other high-ranking websites link back to you. This is main challenge, and you got to put up great content, which people will read because it's interesting, not because you're trying to sell it to them directly.
  

A couple of days ago, the latest Google crawls had just finished - our page ranks were 5 or 6 on all the pages, and we were figuring in the top 5 results for most of our identified key words and phrases. And the most significant proof - business enquiries through our website have gotten back to their previous levels! So if you're getting into business - any kind of business - pay attention to SEO, and you'll go a long way in aiding your sales and marketing efforts.