There are several companies that are cash strapped and as can’t afford to spend money on advertising. If the website is the prime information channel for business, its really important for them to have a improvised SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy as well as creative means to attract users. Working on SEO and SEM at the same time, steadily the focus should be on SEO more than SEM to generate traffic. The more time spent on SEO, the lesser energy and money is spent on SEM. Why someone has to opt for these steps, it’s to promote their website. Companies that have their revenue model largely concentrated on e-commerce, or those with a constrained budget, are now-a-days using the internet to promote themselves. Many companies that like to complement their main-line (or above-the-line) spends have also started using the internet as a key alternative medium.

The key reasons for this shift is growth in internet penetration which is at about 30 million in India. (about 3% of India’s population). As most people in urban areas have easy access to the internet due to falling broadband prices and new products that give better wireless access, and there is a library of information that can be “Googled”; it makes internet an effective tool to communicate. The communication can be made effective by adopting a SEO campaign that follows some set parameters such as keywords, title, page rank, content, images, relevancy, URL address, and age of url.

Keywords

It’s important to know which keywords are important to optimize for. If a website is a retailer of bean bags, it’s important to know what consumers type in Google while searching for bean bags. There are many tools available on Google that help generate this for the website. Try the keyword tool in Google AdWords or wordtracker.

Title

Ensure that the title of webpage is not more than 60 characters. If the website and its competitor have the same particular keyword in equal quantities on title, the next factor becomes the placement of keyword. In this case, its important to ensure that the keywords in title is before that of your competitor’s. For instance, if the keyword is the 25^th character of competitor’s web title, the website should have anything less than that. This way you will feature higher.

It’s also important for Google to know that there is no junk in website title. The way Google determines that is by checking whether the words in website title, by matching those in the content of webpage. If they are not, it won’t do as well as for the website. So choose and use those keywords on home page that are relevant to the website.

Relevancy

Anyone who makes a living off communication knows the importance of relevancy. No advertising is worth its quality if it’s talking to its target market at a point when the category is not relevant to their frame of mind. It would be useless to talk about online bus tickets when someone is sitting at a café. However, it could be extremely relevant when they are “Googling” for bus tickets or when they are waiting for their bus at a bus stand. Even average advertising messages can do wonders when it’s delivered at the right time. So companies must leverage the internet as used by majority of net-surfing population. Google is engineered in such a way that it gives companies selling a genuinely good product an chance to reach out to their customers without incurring a cost, or incurring minimal cost.

Multiple URLs and URL Address

Its important for website owners to not stuff all the keywords in the home page. Optimizing all the URLs in website for different keywords will help them to achieve a good balance between content and form. Extra content kills the design of website. If the URL address contains the keyword, Google gives it more weight as it tells to whom the site belongs to and for what. However now-a-days keywords metatag are lost importance as Google has stopped reading them a while back.

Page Rank

A simple formula devised by Google to check relevancy and the quality of a site is Page Rank. It’s nothing but a vote that shows how other websites look upon website. If site x points a link to site y, then that’s a vote of confidence in site y by x. This goes well in Y’s page rank. More the links, the better the page rank. As the focus is towards’ getting more people to point towards the website having loads of information helps. If a website somehow gets .edu or .gov websites to link its invaluable. The logic being that educational or government websites are more credible than the regulars. However sometimes websites which are less relevant may show up higher than regular websites because of their higher page rank.

Content

While developing content for website, some simple rules need to be followed. Make sure that each keywords have a higher density than other words. As quality content is more important than quantity, ensure that when stuffing the page with keywords, it should make sense to the customer. Otherwise, visitors will leave the webpage in no time and all time spent on SEO will be worthless. As such its important to remember that Google gives more weight to content right on top than that below. Once done with analyzing the search on keywords, its better to understand how one can structure the content in title, description, URL and home page, in that order. It’s always relative, so don’t forget to ensure that the website is placed higher than competitors website. However don’t try to stuff all keywords in the content in such a way that it’s seems meaningless. It’s a fight between quality and quantity. More brownies are scored with content in H1 (header) tags than regular content. More weight goes to larger font than smaller. However its important to understand that negative marking will make website disappear off Google, if someone tries to hide content by making it non-readable (either making the font the same color as the background or making it very small). Google uses Googlebot, its crawler to figure these out. Its blind but not dumb.

Images

Don’t use any flash, unless people know the website URL and owners don’t have to depend on SEO. Use good images to compensate for the lack of flash. Googlebot crawler stops when it sees flash. Put a name to images (the company logo) using alternative text that describes the image for the user, in case the image does not show up in a browser.

Age of URL

Another factor that Google considers important is the age of URL. A competitor’s website that is less relevant may show up higher if its been around for longer time than the website. Once a website crosses the 1 year barrier, it can move up the same league as its competitors.