As an SME it is virtually impossible for us to hire the services of a good SEO company that is going to spend time optimising the site, adding new content and gaining good links for the site, simply because of the cost involved. Other SME's are I am sure in a similar position. They would all love to have a web site that ranked highly in google and the other search engines and brought in a constant flow of new business. However to hire an SEO company to do all those things above is often beyond the reach of many small companies especially those just starting out.
However as a company providing services ourselves and 80% of our new business coming via the internet I can thoroughly recommend that you find a company, invest the money because you will soon get the rewards back. If you feel that you still cannot quite afford to go down that path because money in the company is tight then the other course of action I can recommend is to write articles. I kept seeing and reading all this free advice from SEO's out there on the Web about the benefits of writing articles and submitting to article distribution centres and e-zines. I used to think when reading these words of wisdom how wonderful it would be if only I could do that, but I never did it. Until recently that is. About a month ago I decided I would try writing an article. First what would I write about? Big problem, what could I write about that had any relevance to my website or the services we provided and be of interest to anybody else? So I did a search on one of the article distribution sites looking for articles that had relevance to my own sites content and found nothing of real relevance. So nothing for it I would have to write my own. It still took another week before I came up with any ideas. I focused on what services we provided and how I could turn these into articles. Still nothing actually came of these thoughts. Then one night I was talking to one of our cleaners who was telling me about the problems she was having with the toilet brushes on these particular premises she was working at. They were the wrong shape for doing a good job! The following day I spoke to the company and they agreed we could put our own in. Then I realised that this was a problem in many places especially domestic households. So I wrote my first article about toilet brushes and the why's and how's of how people should approach the purchase of these objects. Once started the words flowed. I submitted this to two article distributors and one ezine. To my surprise it was accepted and I have not looked back. I now write on average two articles per week and have reached the grand total of 24 published articles. Each article gives me about five links on average, some provide more, others less, it depends on who picks them up and republishes them. Most importantly it has boosted my visitors and my backlinks and therefore my search engine position. When I did a search on who was linking to my site these articles produced 12 backlinks for google and a staggering 186 on MSN. It was incredibly interesting to see where my articles were ending up, often in very unexpected places, and it is global, so they can be picked up anywhere in the world.
Do not be put of by the thoughts
? I cannot write
? I have nothing to write about
? Nobody would want to read the things I know about
Because you are wrong on all counts. There is a lot of advice freely available on how to write good articles, go search it out. Everybody who is running a business has expert knowledge on some subject, and lastly the whole world is your audience so there will be many people out there who are interested in what you have to say. Surprise yourself, as I did, give it a go. After the first or second article you will find that they just flow and writing becomes much easier. Very importantly however they do wonders for your website.
David Andrew Smith is the owner of http://www.wesparkle.co.uk a commercial cleaning company which specialises in the cleaning of natural stone
