During their first six years in business George Pallecaros and Jack Panayi struggled to expand their firm, which sold software and equipment for football coaching. They tried enlisting the help of search-engine specialists to boost online traffic but that achieved little.

“I got people in because I knew the website needed a marketing push, but I did not know what the missing ingredient was,” said Pallecaros. “The people we used were a waste of time and they were expensive — they were charging £500 a day. I decided to learn how to do it myself.”

He started looking at search-engine optimisation (SEO) forums, signed up to online courses and bought software to help him identify the keywords that would attract new business through his website Soccertutor.com.

The changes soon made a difference, said Pallecaros. “The business really began to take off after I started working on the website myself. Before, we were probably doing £15,000-£20,000 a year. Now we are doing that much a month and we see it growing. I have spent only between £500 and £750 on lessons and software but you see the results. My time has been the main investment.”

Pallecaros admitted that being technology savvy and knowing some computer coding helped him when he started learning about SEO. Since then, however, making a website search-engine friendly has become much less dependent on technical knowledge, he said.

“Websites are increasingly being built so you can easily change things. A site with a good content management system doesn’t need you to code HTML tags, so anyone can easily make changes. That’s vital if you don’t want to bother your designer every time you want to try a new keyword on your site." Anne White had no technical knowledge when she started using SEO tools to boost sales on aloe-vera-guide.com, her health products website. “I knew as much about SEO at the beginning as I did about Mandarin Chinese. The business started as a hobby website and mushroomed from there,” said White. “I knew I could increase sales if I optimised the pages.”

Instead of paying an SEO specialist thousands of pounds, she pays BT Business a monthly fee of £79 in exchange for reports and advice on how to optimise her website. “You have to do some of the work and implement the changes yourself, but you can talk to experts and ask questions on the phone. It has given me a clear focus on where to improve things.”

Optimising your website need not cost the earth if, like White and Pallecaros, you are prepared to do some of the work yourself, said Bill Murphy, managing director of BT Business, which launched its SearchSmart service to provide SEO expertise for small firms.

“There is a tendency to see SEO as an exotic science but it is not a mystery. It can be done effectively and easily if you are prepared to spend 20 minutes a day perfecting the formula for your own business. You just need to focus on getting the right keywords for your business as well as assessing the data so you know how many people are coming to the site.”

There is plenty of free or inexpensive help for those wanting to get to grips with SEO, said Jeremy Spiller of the White Hat Media consultancy. “Buy a book and check out some of the forums, where you will find some very good how-to guides. The second step is to install Google Analytics on your website; knowing your traffic is vital.

“After that, identify some reasonable objectives and work out how to reach them. Local businesses should include their local area in keywords. Listing on Google Local should also help. It’s all about understanding the sector you are in and finding the best keywords to match your products.

“People can also make short videos very inexpensively. They showcase products well on a website and they are usually well indexed by Google. You can also use Youtube to promote your products this way and it’s free.”

Genuine links with other websites are also important, said Spiller. “About 65% of the reason for a Google ranking is back-links to other sites and we spend most of our time building back-links for our clients.

“You must create genuine back-links, though. Deals with east European link farms are no use and can be harmful, whereas press releases, articles and mentions in social media are very important. Something as simple as getting a link on your local chamber of commerce or an item in the local paper can make a difference.”

Pallecaros said there were other ways to boost your search-engine rankings. “SEO is a big part of driving traffic to your site but don’t forget the other things around that — for example, building a good e-mail list and using it in e-mail campaigns or writing an article or a blog using the right keywords.”

It is also important to look at optimising a website regularly, said Spiller. “It’s not something you do as a project and then stand back. You should look at it much more like tending a garden.”

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