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Get In To The Routine

SEO is a long term activity which needs to be undertaken regularly to have a positive effect on your traffic volumes. Search engines will need to re-index your pages and update their databases so don't expect any changes to have an immediate effect.

Get into a routine of:

Tools To Measure SEO Effectiveness

Google Analytics is free to use and allows you to easily track and measure the organic traffic you are getting to your site and see which search terms are getting you the most traffic. It will clearly show you the percentage of traffic you are getting from search engines and from which search terms.

Google Webmaster Tools is also free to use. Click on the "Statistics" and then the "Top search queries" options to see a handy summary of search results that have included your website and the keywords used for that query and also see which keywords have brought traffic to your website.

Both of the above tools have lots of other features and are well worth investigating further.

Install the Firefox browser and then install the add-on RankChecker from seobook. This tool allows you to quickly check your position in multiple search engines for your chosen keywords. Both Firefox and RankChecker are free.

Final Thoughts

This has been a basic introduction to SEO which provides small businesses with a starting point towards getting their websites optimised for effective keywords and phrases. Good website design and quality content is a pre-requisite for a successful website and keep in mind that SEO is only one of the marketing tasks you will need to get to grips with.

We will be creating other articles soon in the following areas:

Link Building – building quality backlinks to your website will boost your rankings.

Online Social Networking – use social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to introduce your content to a wider audience.

Article Reprinting - create articles for people to use on their websites, including links back to your own website as the subject matter expert.