SEO Tips and Tricks for Small Businesses
Before we get into tips and tricks, here is some basic information on SEO for small business owners.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a strategy in web design or development that typically includes post-design promotional activities aimed at improving search engine recognition of a site. The goal is to get your small business website to appear on or near page one on Google, Yahoo, MSN and other major search engines. The result, especially being ranked #1 on page one, can mean more targeted traffic to your website with the ultimate goal of turning visitors into buying customers.
SEO can also mean a person, or search engine optimizer, who is a direct employee or third-party contractor with the responsibility of fine-tuning your small business website’s programming code, site content, and promotional activities to achieve the first page with the search engines. Like any profession, the level of performance can vary greatly from one to another.
Small brick-and-mortar business owners often launch a new website and expect the site to become the first line of marketing for their product or service. This may be a mistake. Others simply want to enhance their image by showing sophistication with a www domain that features more content than can fit on a business card or brochure.
The first group wants targeted traffic to their site, yet few small business owners really understand search engine optimization, or SEO, so some fall prey to people offering SEO services for a fee. For the second group, simply being online with a website that never changes meets their expectations, and they realize that success depends on direct customer contact and marketing. A third group is similar to the latter group, except that they hope that simply having a website will magically bring about instant fortunes.
If you haven’t already guessed, there are no tricks to search engine optimization. Tips for SEO success should be based on proven techniques with long-term positive results. Hacks that attempt to manipulate the results by deceptive means may be successful in the short term, but will eventually fail.
Search engine algorithms for establishing rankings like Google PageRank are secret. The best you can do is guess how and why they change by following each quarterly update. Most PageRank watchers, or PR for short, are trying to unravel what Google considers important, and then manipulate their strategy to improve their ranking in search results. That could be a mistake. If adjusting the strategy means manipulating what some believe is important, all too often they resort to deceptive means with short-term gains.
I have written many times that deceptive practices will backfire. You will be punished. If you keep track of PR or take advice from SEO gurus, you’ve heard the cliché “Content is King.” My position remains that the secret to search engine optimization is to design sites for visitors first, and then add quality original content frequently to get people’s and search engines’ attention.
“Content is King” should be changed to “Original Quality Content is King.” Traffic is meaningless if visitors don’t stick around long enough to become paying customers. I think the algorithm tweak in 2007 and the downward shift in overall PR for so many sites is more of a temporary adjustment. Also, I don’t think Google is punishing website owners who provide quality original content. Instead, I believe that millions of websites created and modified just to fool the search engines are being caught and punished, and the PR ladder in 2007 has shifted down for quality site owners to fill that void. and redefine the range of PageRank.
Small business website owners need to understand the best practices of SEO strategies. Here are some search engine optimization tips that I posted on my website in 2007. The first is the entrée on my menu to feed search engines using an analogy comparing search engines to restaurants. Following that list are practices to avoid from the same article on my site.
Positive Search Engine Optimization Practices to Consider:
1. Keywords in the page title
2. Keywords in H tags
3. The era of your WWW domain
4. The size of your website
5. Backlinks (incoming links to your pages)
6. Keywords in text links
7. High-quality original content
Negative or misleading SEO practices to avoid:
1. Not having advertising pages only for affiliates. You need original content.
2. Do not have over-optimized pages. It will not help SEO and may confuse your visitors.
3. Not having link schemes, incoming or outgoing. Deceptive practices will backfire.
4. Don’t have identical content hosted on two separate domains (mirror sites).
5. Not have plagiarized content. It’s illegal, and the search engines can tell.
6. Do not use obscene language like swearing or content that is hateful or racist.
In conclusion, continue to evaluate your small business website SEO strategy. Leverage best practices and avoid negative or misleading methods, and you can be successful. Most small business entrepreneurs cater to a local market, so ranking your pages against the world could mean that very high PageRank is impossible. By following the advice given here, you might just have enough to outperform your local competition, and that’s probably all that matters.