All's fair in love and SEO - Page 2

4. Social media

As even the most SEO-illiterate technophobes should be aware, SEO rule number one is the more pages linking to your site, the higher your site will be ranked. Generating those links is difficult, though: unless you have a media-friendly product or you have managed to encourage bloggers to expatiate on the subject of your services, you may find you have to resort to link exchanges with other websites.

Social media, though, is helping to change all that: by creating groups and profiles on sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, you can create your own links to your site using key phrases which will help to boost your copy for your chosen search terms.

So we'll create one normal ad which says 'Home cinema from the UK's leading experts', but we'll do another one which says 'Home cinema installations, minimum spend £30,000'

5. Misspellings

If you have a pay-per-click campaign, using misspellings may be a cheaper way of boosting your click-through ratio. "If we take a common search term such as 'mortgages', how many people spell it without the 't'?" asks Arkell. "It's a way to target traffic that would have been overlooked by competitors and draw more traffic for less cost, because a common misspelling is going to be far cheaper as a phrase than the correct variation of the term."

6. Negative ad copy

Another pay-per-click technique. While encouraging as many people as possible to click on your ad may improve your traffic figures, those figures won't necessarily convert to business if your site isn't what your visitors are looking for. By slimming down the number of visitors to your site, you should be able to enhance your conversion rate.

"For example, say a business does home cinema installation," says Arkell. "They might say 'we're not expecting to deal with people who want an LCD screen hung on the wall, we want to deal with people who want to spend at least £30,000 on the full package. So we'll create one normal ad which says 'Home cinema from the UK's leading experts', but we'll do another one which says 'Home cinema installations, minimum spend £30,000.

"You'll see a much lower click-through rate (CTR), fewer people are going to respond to it because some people will be looking for a cheap option, but you'll find the conversion rate is far, far higher, which means you'll be spending less on wasted clicks."

7. Cash in on your competitors

If all else fails, why not just make like our esteemed peers and buy up the brand names of your competitors? Google made it possible to do so earlier this year - but watch what you put in your ad. "You're able to bid on any trademark or brand, but what you can't do is include the brand name in your ad copy. If I decided on Bose, for example, for an audio equipment company, I could bid on their name, but if I run a company called Rob's Electronics, I can bid on the company name, but I wouldn't be able to try and pose as Bose as such."