Top position in the search engines is a must

This may be an obvious statement that we all know!

The search engines are seen by many as the future of there business the amount that they spend on getting there new products into a database, on to froggle and ebay and other realated site's, is what many see as there best way of doing things.

Now I am not saying that they are wrong by marketing themselves into the shopping site and there own site database, but where would you start if you are looking for a more industry specific product that you usual ipods and cheap memory you might try on ebay.

What about industry specific equipment

I am talking about the like of plant and specialist vehicle, one off and project work.

The first thing that you should look at doing is to make yourselves aproachable, do not have a site with a lot of over technical details talking about the nitty gritty of how you do your specific project and purpose, this will only give your competition the great idea's that you have.

Get a free phone number

This may seam an expensive option, but if you are looking for sales of a £100,00,00 piece of plant moving equipment and the one call gets your sales people in those 30 or so people who used your number to try sell you thing do not really matter, Make the freephone number obviously the Sales Line only and offer other numbers for Technical help General Enquiries and Accounts etc.

Make First Email Contact Easy

The contact form on the left of this screen is an obvious way of doing this, this is written in PHP and send the emails securely straight throught to the site email box. Also make the email address quite obvious on the page a visitor may want to write it down and use it later

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a subset of search engine marketing, and deals with improving the number and/or quality of visitors to a web site from "natural" (aka "organic" or "algorithmic" search engine) listings. The term SEO can also refer to "search engine optimizers", an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients.

(SERP)

Search engines display different kinds of listings on a search engine results page (SERP), including paid advertising in the form of pay per click advertisements and paid inclusion listings, as well as unpaid organic search results and keywords specific listings, such as news stories, definitions, map locations, and images. SEO is concerned with improving the number and position of a site's listings in the organic search results.

SEO strategies vary widely

SEO strategies vary widely, in accordance with the specific site. Broadly speaking, SEO may be geared towards increasing either, or both, the total number and quality of visitors from Search Engines. The quality of a visitor can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase or requesting further information.

stand-alone service or marketing campaign

Search engine optimization is available as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because SEO often requires making changes to the source code of a site, it is often most effective when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term "Search Engine Friendly" to describe designs, menus, Content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively.

A range of strategies and techniques are employed in SEO, including changes to a site's code (referred to as "on page factors") and getting links from other sites (referred to as "off page factors"). These techniques include two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who utilize them, as either "white hat SEO", or "black hat SEO".[1] Other SEOs reject the black and white hat dichotomy as an over-simplification.

SEO, as a marketing strategy, can often generate a good return. However, as the search engines are not paid for the traffic it sends from organic search, the algorithms used can and do change and there are many problems that can cause a Search Engine problems when crawling or ranking a site's pages, there are no guarantees of success, either in the short or long term. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, SEO is often compared to traditional Public Relations (PR), with PPC advertising closer to traditional advertising.