SEO Advice for Small Businesses
Published on: 16/09/2010 12:33:00 AM
One of the most common questions I get from new small business clients is, “How do I get my website ranked high on Google?”. It’s a great question and one that has many answers. Depending on the website content, the time it takes to rank well on Google varies, however there are steps that you can take to increase your chances.
Create a Blog
One of the best ways to get your website ranked well on Google is to not only create a blog, but create a blog using WordPress. WordPress does a great job of SEO optimization so a lot of the work is already done for you. It’s open source as well, so you can fine tune your blog with the many plugins available to you.
Quality Content
We have all heard the term content is king, but what does this really mean? It means that if the content you write on your website and/or blog is quality content, not only will you have people interested in your website and become repeat visitors, but you will also start to rank higher in search engines due to the fact other people will most likely link to your website. The reason this is important is that inbound links are very important in search ranking as well. It’s kind of a trickle down effect. It starts with the content, then based off of that, other key aspects occur.
Keyword Targeting
Somewhat related to quality of content is the targeting of keywords. One of the biggest recommendations is to think about what a person is going to search for and use them throughout your website and blog. You, the small business owner would know all the different terms in your specific area. Suppose you are going to target USB Thumb Drives. There are several other variations that people may use. They could use “Flash Drives”, “Thumb Drives”, “USB Drives”, etc. By targeting all of those key phrases in your content you cover a lot more ground and allow the search engines to index your pages based on all of those key words.
Useful Services
If you can provide a useful service or resource, people will have a reason to come back to your website. For instance, if you have a website on fishing and hunting, you could have a FAQ or Tutorial section where you allow others to interact by asking questions, or by participating in tutorials. It gives more of a reason to return to your website for valuable information. So more than just telling people a little about your company and what you do, you can give end users useful information, and this will help with return visits.
Google Webmaster Central
By signing up for Google Webmaster Central, you will gain access to all kinds of useful resources. Once you register and validate your website, you can view stats on all sorts of things; queries you are showing up for, clicks that people are doing, etc. You can also view the list of indexed pages you have on google, any pages not found, and submit sitemaps. By using Google Webmaster Central, you can better understand why and how things are happening with your website.
Google Local
I wrote a post back in September on why it’s important to use Google Local. The basic premise behind it is to take advantage of people searching locally in Google. For example, if you add your Toronto based law firm business to Google Local, and someone searches Toronto Law Firms, you will be listed in the Google Local Business directory listings, and possible in the first 10 results which is displayed on the first page of search results.
Eliminate Fluff
What I mean by eliminating fluff is remove or do not include items that do nothing to benefit your website. Examples of this is having a complete website developed in Flash. Implementing specific components in flash is fine, but a website developed entirely in flash is not necessary. Other examples are controls with in a website that rely on Javascript to work properly. A good way to see what your website looks like to a search engine is to view it in a text only browser. You may not have access to a text only browser, so if you use something like SEO Browser you can visually see what search engines see when crawling your website.
Conclusion
There are many ways to gain rank for small business websites. It does take a little bit of effort and knowledge, but by following some of the ideas above, you should be on your way in no time.