SEO Tips for the Small Business Owner’s Website
Sensible SEO tips that any business owner can implement on their websites quickly. Search Engine Optimization is not a mysterious science. You (and your web designer) can start having your SEO-friendly website through these little insights.
These are really fundamental stuff that you shouldn’t be paying a SEO consultant to tell you.
1. BYOD - Buy Your Own Domain
If you have your own bricks-and-mortar small business, would you send mail to your neighour’s house? Blogspots, Facebook Groups, Free Directories and others, have their place in the Internet online marketing arena - but nothing beats credibility than having your own domain.
Besides, it’s really cheap to register a name and get basic hosting.
Having your own business name as your domain name is great for branding purposes. But it’s not the end of the SEO game if you can’t get that. There are many businesses out there, whose service or product offerings shout louder than their business name. This is what Search Engine Optimization is all about.
Having your own domain primarily gives you control in developing the SEO effort for your website.
2. Website Analytics is your Key Intelligence
A good battle plan survives on good intel.
If you already have your own website, you need to know about:
- How many people are coming to your website (traffic),
- How they come to your website (typing your domain name or Google/Yahoo/etc search?),
- What pages do they visit and how long do they stay (quality of content),
- Where in the world do they come from (market segments)
- etc
Google Analytics gives the small business owner all these insights and more. Usually the challenge comes in interpreting the information and taking appropriate action based on that information. But if you are starting out new on this, don’t worry too much about it. Plug in the Analytics Code first, and just let the traffic flow. Understanding will come when the numbers grow a little.
At worst, you will already have some traffic history for when you engage the SEO Consultant. This would invariably be the first step for the consultant and just implementing this SEO tip today will save you time.
3. Content By Keyword
When your business is a going concern, there is usually no shortage of words to describe what you offer or your company does. Building content for your webpages is usually a minor hassle when compared to how to actually structure that content.
A good SEO tip would be to do some Keyword Research based on what your business offers or solves. The free version of Wordtracker helps you see what people are typically searching for. What they search for, become the keywords that you can target for your content.
Remember that as a business, you offer solutions. However, people tend to search by their problems or pain. Do not forget to include content pages for the symptomatic conditions leading to your service offering.
4. Keyword in your Title
This SEO tip is probably the most important thing that you can do for your own website. The Title is the prime real estate space on any website. It is the primary means by which major search engines start evaluating your web content and checking if the rest of the page content aligns to this.
Which is why you would never leave it to say “Welcome to my website”. Nor have it the same on every page on your website. Internet Marketers know this and sometimes they go the other extreme of spamming keywords here.
If you have already written unique content and had it aligned to some important keywords, then choose the most important keyword as a Title for that page. It can be a page for a problem that is addressed, or a page for a solution that resolves the problem. The point here also, is that every page title should be differentiated and targeted.
5. Link Strategically and Appropriately
In your natural business, would you associate your business name to just any other organisation? Probably not. You would have a plan as to how to align your company to other companies; be they alliances, friendly competitors or partners along your value chain or supply chain.
It’s the same online. Don’t just buy into a link farm. Have a strategy about it too. The SEO tip here is that there are 3 types of links that can build on/for your website.
- Internal Links - These are fully the links that you control, navigating the reader from the content pages describing their problem areas to the content pages describing your offered products and services. This is a powerful strategy and the search engine spiders like these.
- Outbound Links - These are links that you place on your webpages, bringing the reader OUT of your website. Who you link to, also tells your readers who you associate with. So rather than paying a link farm (which the search engines would probably detect and penalize anyway), you should build your outbound links the same way you build your natural business referrals. Link to these websites where they add to your overall value proposition. If you are wary and not sure of the external link but still wish to have them linked anyway, put them on a separate page of links AWAY from your business offering pages.
- Inbound Links -Inbound links are links on other people’s websites that bring readers INTO your website. Apart from the SEO linkage effect of incoming links from reputable websites, you would also want relevant reader traffic. You want to build inbound links from relevant trade associations, forums, targeted directories, and perhaps even from blogs of people in your similar or compatible business segment. Again, avoid link farms - it is like “guilty by association”.
These are the Basic SEO Tips that you can do for yourself, even without engaging any SEO Consultant yet. Who ever you hire, would also put you through these paces. At a chargeable rate.
You want your SEO Experts to work harder. I’ll have a later post to show you what you should expect from them.
External Reading
- http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
- http://searchengineland.com/21-essential-seo-tips-techniques-11580
- http://www.whitehatmedia.com/papers-and-articles/top-10-seo-tips.html
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One Response to “SEO Tips for the Small Business Owner’s Website”
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Nice article. Great explanation :), there’s one addition i’d like to suggest. i.e. ‘Keyword Research’ and building a SEO Strategy before buying a domain. Works well and the webmaster doesn’t need to regret later on having bought a domain name not relating to the niche/keyword.