Make no mistake about it: your website is one of your best marketing tools. But what can you do to attract potential customers to you site? To answer this question, let’s consider the consumer’s point of view. You’re looking for information and pricing regarding a particular product or service; where do your begin your search? Very often, you’ll type a few keywords into a search engine such as Google™ or Yahoo!®. Also very often, you’ll examine the sites that appear on the first page that appears and ignore pages two through infinity…

And this is where the concept of Search Engine Optimization, better known by its acronym SEO, comes in. You want to do whatever you can to be listed on that first page. With that in mind, here are a few suggestions to improve your ranking among the more popular search engines:

• First, consider what phrases you want your site to be associated with. A phrase such as “Landscaping Services” is too generic: there are thousands of companies that offer landscaping services and unless you’re a large, well established company it will be impossible to work your way to the very top of the list. Try to be more specific, like adding a word or two that explains what type of landscaping you do or what area you serve. A better phrase to attempt to optimize would be “Landscaping Services New Jersey.” Again, it’s best to think about what phrases a potential consumer would use to find someone who has what you have to offer.
• Once you have figured out what phrases you wish to optimize, it’s time to add them to your website. The most obvious course of action is to incorporate them into the text of your website ( “…providing landscaping services in the Southern New Jersey area…” ), but there is another area often overlooked: the title bar. Just simply renaming your webpages to something containing your search phrase can greatly improve your search engine ranking.
• Use text for your website’s internal links. Search engines rank text links higher than graphical ones and they also give you another opportunity to associate your site with a search phrase.
• For images on your website, use “Alt tags.” An Alt tags is text that will show up if an image is unavailable or, if the image is available this will be the text that appears when the mouse “hovers” over the image. In either case this gives something else for the search engine to associate your site with.
• Search engines will rank a website higher if there are many relevant external links to it. So find a way to have your site listed on other sites. If you have business partners, make a deal to add a link to each other’s site! This will benefit both you and your business partners. However be cautious; the quality of your external links is more important than the quantity. There are plenty of websites that try to boost their site’s search engine ranking by sharing links with every site they possibly can, regardless of how relevant the content of these sites might be. The search engine companies have caught onto this scheme and actually will lower a website’s ranking if they appear to be doing this. Suffice it is to say, a few good links will do your website more good than a lot of bad links.
• If you are looking for dramatic improvement, you could hire the services of a company that specializes in search engine optimization. One such company is Search Optimizers . They will work with you to create the best phrases to drive business to your website and offer monthly reports of where your site ranks among many of the most popular search phrases.

This should be enough to get you started. As Zig Ziglar would say, "See you at the top (of the search engine rankings)!"