As a reader of this column you might already have taken the first step in marketing your business. In that case you probably have already invested time and money to showcase your company online - via your own website.

Your website will contain important information about your company, including which services and products you offer.

You will also come up with your own design and profile, to give visitors a positive impression of a sound company.

Naturally, your current customers will benefit from your website as well. Still you need to get information into the hands of potential customers who are scouring the search engines for information, products, and services related to their market segment or their product needs.

This is where a good SEO (search engine optimization) strategy comes in.

Finding good phrases/keywords is a good start. How do you identify which phrases your potential customers will search for when trying to find your products?

One good suggestion is to ask friends and colleagues who know a bit about the business in which you operate, how they would try to find your product through

a search engine, and ask them which phrases they would use when searching for you.

A phrase would typically consist of 2-3 words. For example, if you offer diving services in Phuket then “diving vacation phuket” would be a good choice.

You should end up with a good list of about 20-30 phrases related to your business.

Then you should create about one extra page within your site for each of your “keyword/phrases.”

1. Assign one page for each phrase/keyword you created

2. Make a text of about 200 words for each page, the text needs to be built around the phrase you selected.

3. Make sure that there will be a link from the front page of your site to each of the tailor-made pages.

4. Make sure you mention the phrase in the title area of your page.

5. Make sure that the meta description of your page makes sense, because the search engine will show this to the searcher when they get the result of the search. If it does not make any sense, or if it is just a collection of keywords rather than a targeted sales phrase, then your potential customer will be less likely to click on it.

There are also several other ways to optimize for phrases on different pages. The above way is simply one way of doing this.

Getting good quality links into your website is very important.

Quality links coming in will increase the value of the text on every page of your site.

Adding the aforementioned pages for phrases which will contain about 200 words each is however not the best way of getting incoming links though, it is very hard to make an article with real value for a potential customer with only about 200 words.

The 200 words articles might only benefit you if you already have a pagerank of about 3-5, if you have less Pagerank than this you might want to add longer articles that will give genuine advice or value to customers, with information that can make an impact of their choices in life.

Adding a blog to your website might give your employees the ability to communicate with your customers and actually accomplish this.

You want to add articles that people will think might benefit them and others, articles or content that they will need to bookmark or link to for their own future reference.

It might be product comparisons or information that you at one time needed and found a solution to, now you can give this information to others, one example being this article:

EVDO Wireless information<--Example of article giving users information they need in their day to day life

For other ways of building Pagerank there are various free and paid catalogues on the web which can help you make this happen.

One website which carries a collection of such is: http://top.seo-links.org/

If the incoming link to your website contains some of the phrases/keywords which you have chosen above that is a great plus.

It is important to get your website listed in a couple of good catalogues. In some cases your website will fit into more than one category in a specific catalogue. In that case you will want to link to the page which has the highest PAGERANK(TM).

PAGERANK(TM) can be identified in a couple of different ways, one of which is installing the Google™ toolbar to your firefox browser. This can be done at “http://toolbar.google.com/”.

The firefox webbrowser is a very good free browser which can be obtained at http://www.mozilla.com.

During installation of the Google™ toolbar you will get a window in which you will need to tell it to enable Pagerank.

Another good way of getting incoming links is getting friends and business partners to link to your site.

Please note that if your website has a very low Pagerank (0-3) you should not add a lot of content at one time, and instead build your extra content gradually.

If you add too much content at one time you run the risk of Google ignoring your new content.

If this should happen you should just remove the new content and add it gradually in a different subfolder of your website.

Please note that one of the most important weights for SEO today is your domain name itself. So it might pay to take great care when you first choose a name for your website.

You might also wonder why I do not mention any of the other search engines in this column?

The fact in most cases is that if you rank high on Google™ then you will very likely rank quite high on the other search engines as well.

Each of the topics above can also be explored more in depth.

A couple of good links for this are:

http://top.seo-links.org/.

Or just simply go to http://www.google.com and search for “SEO”

You might already have followed some of the advice given in this article/post, but some of those eluvise and hard to get top position phrases seems just out of reach.

They might be closer than you think, they might actually be right there in the title tag of your frontpage.

The only catch is you did not put them there yet.

To my experience, you can actually fit 3 to 4 different phrases right there on your front page, and scoring very well on them.