For local businesses to truly represent the best of Bury online, they need to ensure that their websites are not only pleasing to the eye and easy for potential clients or customers to navigate, they also need to be optimised – an online marketing term which basically means they need to be tweaked for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in order to make their way to the top of the Google search results when consumers carry out local searches in the Bury area.

There are various techniques to follow when it comes to effective website SEO, and many people now know the basics, such as making sure the name of the Bury business or important keywords connected with its trade are in the various URLs of the web pages. However, there is more that needs to be done if your business wants to be seen as the best of Bury by the search engines.

Here's five top tips:

1. Organise and plan a system of internal linking. Internal links are a very effective way to boost your Bury business up the search rankings. Every page of a site should contain a unique topic and this should be mentioned – and linked to – on as many of the other pages as possible. Ultimately all pages should contain links to related items and other pages for the full benefit of the SEO to be felt.

2. Plan your content carefully. There's more to SEO than simply ramming your Bury business website chock-full of keywords, as consumers will soon notice that your site has stopped making sense and has just become a repetitive jumble. The key to avoiding this pitfall, if you are not a writer yourself, is to employ the services of professional copywriters who can create original and appropriate content with keywords woven in, rather than simply spun out of nothing.

3. Make it simple for search engines to index and crawl around your site. A comprehensive site map is a must, with all the right titles and tags in place. This makes it easier for search engines to index and “crawl” – using programs called “web crawlers” which sift the internet and automatically update their indexes of its various sites.

4. Begin working on your backlinks. The flipside to internal links is backlinks – outgoing links from your site that connect with other websites. This is often achieved by commenting on another site's discussion forums while adding a link to your own, or by citing the home page of leading media outlets or other businesses within the same sector. With Bury businesses, it should not be too difficult to create a mutually supportive network of backlinks, with a little effort.

5. Locate your Unique Selling Point and plug this hard! From the first moment Bury consumers hit your landing page, they must be in no doubt about what you do and what makes you unique. This should be in the forefront of the mind when designing or revamping a site, as should be the emphasis on localism. The “worldwide” web is in fact a great way to service local areas, your Bury business is focused on serving its community, and your pages should reflect this.

For more information please visit www.onlinemediadirect.co.uk