With the economy in the shape that it is in these days, and a medling Government that shows no signs of helping the Small Businessman, a local business person has his or her back to the wall when it comes to finding new ways in bringing in customers and one that is affordable. Fortunately many small business owners already have a resource at hand that will help them do just that. It just needs some help. That would be your Website.
Sure, most business owners have a website, but can they be found when searched for on the Internet. Small business owners run their business and most are not SEO savvy enough to know how to get their website ranked high so that their customers can find their company information. By taking a few minutes each week, you can improve your small business website’s rankings with these tips. A while back I talked to a Houston SEO Expert who said that he used the tips below to routinely rank small business websites so his Customers would dominate their local niches.
One place to start is the usability of your website. Begin by removing flash movies or any music you might have imbedded on your site. Web designers have a tendancy to sell Flash components at a huge markup to unsuspecting small business owners. User study after user study have found that these two components turn off web users. Flash and Javascript add no SEO benefit to your website so why would you use it? Are you trying to entertain your visitors or do you want them to buy goods and services from you.
Make sure that your main keywords are in the Title of your main page. I see small business websites without their keyword in the Title all the time. They’re missing out on one of the most important aspects of SEO there is. If you own Bob’s Widget Company, then those three words should be in the Title of the main page.
If at all possible, there should be a page on your website for each product, or group of similar products, or services your company offers. When you use each page of your site to describe a specific product or service, you’ll end up with many pages of unique content, each SEO optimized.
When creating each of your product pages, make sure the specific keyword you’re using in the Title is actually worked into the content of the page. Normally using the keyword 2 to 3 times on the page is sufficient. The last thing you want is a page to look spammy, so don’t repeat the keywords more than 2 to 3 times if it can be helped. Keyword abuse, or keyword stuffing as many call it, can get you penalized by the search engines. The last thing you want is to have to hire a ORM consultant company to clean up your online reputation after you ruined it!
You want to know the most important part of SEO optimizing your site? It’s linkbuilding. Links are the magic bullets that will get your site ranked higher. Make sure you create anchor text links that point back to your main page as well as the inner pages for maximum benefits. A lot of small business owners will just use the words ‘Click Here’ when they make a link back to their site. This is okay, but a better way is to use the keyword that you used in your Title as the hypertext link. Any link pointing to your pages should have the keywords as the anchor text of the link. Make sure you change up the anchor text also. Having all the same anchor text links pointing to your site will get you penalized by Google. It’s known as Googlebombing.
These tips will get your website moving up in the rankings in short order. There’s really no need to hire a SEO expert unless you would feel more comfortable having a pro do it. As you can see, it’s pretty simple, straightforward stuff. Not the Black Magic some SEO experts try to make you believe it is
Filed under: Small Business Management
