Small Business

Introduction to SEO for small businesses

One of the most neglected opportunities for small businesses is search engine optimization (SEO).

Taking a little time to understand what SEO is and how it can help you drive more business is critical to small business success.

As a small business owner, you have more opportunities than ever for SEO success.

There are six basic fundamentals of SEO.

Keyword research

Selecting the right keywords and phrases for your website content, page titles and meta descriptions is critical to the success of any small business search engine optimization campaign.

Your first step, defining your keywords or keyword phrases, is to review your website analytics solution (such as Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools). This will help you better understand your site’s most popular content, as well as the keywords that visitors use to find your content.

Content

The content of your small business website is one of the most important factors for successful search engine optimization. The pages you create should provide valuable information that references very specific terms (i.e., your keywords) and concepts that are unique to your website.

If you succeed in weaving your keywords into compelling copy (remember to write for humans, not search engines), you are more likely to be relevant to keyword searches. Focus the content of each page on a single key phrase and topic.

Try to create website content as often as possible. For some, this means every day, and for others it means once a week. Fresh content encourages search engines to crawl your website more often and consider it a valuable Internet content contributor.

Titles and Meta Tags

The title tag is a piece of code hidden on your website. It is visible in the title bar of your web browser and as the title of a search fragment in the search engine results.

A good title tag is more likely to get a click on your site. A meta tag is also an HTML code that describes your website. The information you provide in a meta tag is used by search engines to index a page.

Internal link

Good navigation through your website is not only important for your users; search engines use the links within your website to crawl and index the pages they point to.

Ideally, a search engine should start on your home page and be able to crawl, and therefore index, your entire website. Search engines can crawl several types of links, such as standard text links, linked graphics, and image maps contained in graphics.

If the search engine does not index your entire website, much of the valuable content in the background will never appear in a search result. That’s why a good text link is so important. The more direction you give the search engines, the more likely they are to follow your links and index larger parts of your website.

External link

Obtaining links from another website to your website (external link) is one of the most important factors in obtaining high rankings in search engine results pages (SERP). Search engines see external links as votes of confidence and are powerful and positive indicators of the authority and reliability of your website.

For the external link to work in your favor, the link must:

  • Be from a reliable website: buying links will affect your ranking
  • To be a popular link page with good traffic.
  • Contain relevant content between your website and the source website
  • Use keyword phrases in the anchor text (that is, the text you click that links to your website). Avoid the common mistake of using “Click here” as anchor text.
  • Be from a website within your industry. For example, if you’re a beauty salon, it’s better to get a link from a well-known hairdressing company rather than a roller-skating rink.

Local and social.

Localization and social media have become valuable tools to improve the position of your site in search engines. Social networking sites not only provide you with the opportunity to post links to your new content, but also drive traffic to your website.

Linking and traffic, as well as social interactions, such as likes, followers and 1s, are seen as positive indicators of your website’s value by search engines.