The Key To Small Business SEO

Do you run a small business?

Do you sell only locally?

If you answered yes to both the questions above I am willing to bet that you think you don’t need to have a website and to optimize your website for the search engines.

If you live in a very small community, under 10,000 in population, you are probably right, but if you are in a larger community you might want to re-think this.

The internet is fast becoming the number one resource to find where to buy products, locally and internationally.

This means that if you don’t have a website and don’t turn up in the search engines for your community and your product you are probably loosing sales.

Every small business should have a website of some sort up and running and they should optimize it for the search engines as much as possible.

What’s that you say? You don’t know how to optimize your site for the search engines?

You can always hire a search engine professional like myself to run a full fledge search engine optimization campaign for your site but that would, most likely, prove cost prohibitive for most small businesses. Depending on what you are aiming for the cost would be between $2000 and $5000 per month.

You can do it yourself, with some training.

1. You need to know how to do keyword research to find all the profitable keywords for your site.
2. You need to know how to format your title tag, meta tags and proper use of H tags in your code.
3. You can write content that can be submitted to article distribution sites.
4. You need to know how to set up a geocentric campaign for your website to drive local business.
5. You need to know what content you should have available on your site that is unique to your site only.

Yes you can do this all by yourself but you will spend a lot of time learning how to do it the proper way.

Another solution is to hire a local SEO firm to handle this for you as a small package or quick start package instead of spending months pouring through the information trying to decide which is good and which is bad. Believe me there is a lot more bad information out there than good.

I offer a quick start package for businesses in my local area (St. Thomas, USVI) and there are others that offer it to local businesses and to other businesses that find them on the internet.
I highly recommend that you use a certified search engine optimization expert to handle this for you because the certification means they know at least enough about the topic to pass the test. This will also stop you from getting the guy that has read one of the bad products on search engine optimization and is now a, “SEO expert” from taking your money and damaging your rankings.

Remember: the quick start package I described isn’t a full search engine optimization campaign but it will do wonders in raising your ranking for local searches.

If you are interested in retaining my services you can look them over on the St. Thomas SEO Services page.

No related posts.

The question is should you pay to have your site submitted to the search engines every month?

The answer to this is, only if it is 1999 or 2000. This method helped back in the day but now there is no advantage to submitting to search engines repeatedly. As a matter of fact with the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) if it is done too often your site will actually be flagged for spamming the search engine.

What’s that you say? You aren’t worried about it because the service is submitting your site to thousands of search engines.

Yes, they are submitting to thousands but if you want to get visitors to your site from the search engines there are four you need to concentrate on.

Google – 72% of US Searches in Feb 2009
Yahoo! – 17% of US Searches in Feb 2009
MSN – 5.5% of US Searches in Feb 2009
ASK – 3.7% of US Searches in Feb 2009

Do the math that is 98.2% of all searches done in the US are done on 4 search engine the other 1.8% is divided between thousands of other search engines (actually only about 46 of them made the report). Where do you think you are going to get visitors from?

Just incase you think I made up these numbers you can check them at HitWise

Does this mean that you should not submit to the thousands of search engines that are available?

No go ahead and submit to them if they are indexed you should at least get a backlink from them but I wouldn’t count on too much traffic.

But once you have submitted to a search engine and you are listed there, submitting again IS NOT going to improve your position in the search results, no matter how many times you submit.

For the last five or six years I haven’t even submitted a site to the search engines. The search engines actually prefer to find the links with their spiders that are out scouring the internet. The reason for this is that they assume that a link to a site isn’t an attempt to spam the search engine. When I have a new site I want to get indexed I put a link to the new site on one of my already established sites that I know the search engine spiders visit on a regular basis. This get my new site indexed usually in a day or two, sometimes as fast as an hour (rarely but it has happened).

What do you do if you don’t have an already established site?

In this situation you can create a lens at Squidoo or a page at Hubpages and have a link from there to your new site. This doesn’t work as well as having your own site linking back to you but it does get you indexed in Google in usually less than one week. Remember if you do this don’t create the page (or lens) and only put one link on it back to your site add some content that might be of value to the reader because this page or lens will be there for ever and will reflect your site in some way.

You can also submit to directories and submit articles to get links back to your site. The more links you have, formatted the right way, the better your search engine ranking will be.

No related posts.

1. Babies Walk Before They Run – Most search engines aren’t dumb, at least the ones that count aren’t. If you have a site that is only a week old and it has 1,000 back links to it, the search engines are going to wave a red flag and say, “Just a minute, this shouldn’t be happening.” Your back links should grow naturally. This means that you won’t get 1,000 back links in just a couple of days. The main place this can really hurt you is if you are using article marketing. A lot of people are using submitters that will blast your article to 1,000 plus article directories overnight. Which on the face of it seems like a good thing but if you actually get published on all those directories in 24 hours you will be facing a possible worsening of your search engine ranking. If you are going to use a submitter try to find one that does the submission over a period of time so that you don’t get penalized for growing too fast. This really only applies to newer sites but even the older sites can be looked at if they have a 1000 time increase in their back links in a short period of time.

2. One Way is Better Then Round Trip – The main job of the search engine spiders is to find new pages, they do this by following the outbound links on your site. They don’t like it if the bounce back and forth and make no progress. This is what happens if you have too many reciprocal links on your site. Every time the spider leaves your site they are bounced back to your site by your partner’s link to you. This is something that is very easy for a spider to track and if it happens too much then you will be penalized for it. If you are working with reciprocal links limit them to one reciprocal link for every 3 outgoing links you have and boost the one way links to your site with submissions to directories and article submission.

3. Being Part of The Crowd Doesn’t Pay – There are a lot of link sites out there, some times called “link farms” that you can list you site on to get back link. Be part of this crowd too many times can actually hurt your ranking. There are a couple of reasons for this and part is that there are too many outbound links on the page and the second part is that there are too many different topics on the page. Having too many outbound links means that all the links will share any page rank the site might have this means you won’t get much. The best links come from the textual content of a page with your keywords as the anchor text (the words that create the link) and the page content being about or similar to your keywords. When you are on a link farm there is almost always a large number of topics on the page and you usually don’t get anchor text links.

4. Page Rank is Everything. NOT! – Everybody wants back links from sites with high page rank. This is actually good but if all your back links come from sites with the same type of page rank you will again get the search engines raising the red flag and looking at your site. The reason for this is there are places out there where you can buy one way links to your site. The search engines don’t like these services and if your site grows naturally you will never have all your back links coming from sites with a page rank of 5 or higher. Back links with a page rank of 1 will help your site, especially if you can get your keywords in the anchor text for the link. If you are running a back link campaign go after them all not just the high ranking sites. If you are purchasing back links make sure that they provide you with an assortment of sites with different page ranks and not just high ranking sites.

5. Variety is The Spice of Links – You have heard me say that you should you’re your keyword in the anchor text of your back link. This is very true but you shouldn’t have the same text in every back link or the same keyword in every back link. You should have a list of keywords for your site. Create a number of different links that use different text and different keywords in the anchor text. This will make your site rank higher on more keywords and it looks better to the search engines because people don’t phrase things the same way. If all the back links to your site are exactly the same then the search engines start grouping your links the same way they group duplicate content.

Remember back links are good but they can always be better. Remember the above to optimize your back link campaign.

No related posts.

Search Engine Optimization – SEO – This is using various methods to get your website to turn up in the search engines when people search for specific words. In other words, if you want to be the first result that people see on Google or Yahoo! when they search the term, “starting steps” you need to make sure that your website is optimized for the keyword “starting steps”

Anchor Text – this is the text that you see when a text link is created. For example Blogging Beginners is a link and the anchor text for that link is Blogging Beginners.

Backlinks – are links on the internet that are not on your site but do link directly to your site. (also see reciprocal links, three way links and one way links)

Black Hat SEO – this is a term that is used for questionable or outright disallowed methods of search engine optimization. These methods might work in the short term but usually end up getting you so far back in the search engine rankings that your site will never see the light of day. Once you get flagged by the search engines for your website for using Black Hat techniques it is almost impossible to get good rankings.

Browser – a browser is a software program that lets you view websites on the internet. There are numerous browsers that include; Internet Explorer, Flock, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and a few others. The title tag of a web page

Cascading Style Sheets – CSS – like the name implies these are style sheets that control the appearance of your webpage (I am not sure where the cascading comes from). The main advantage to these is that they can be put in an external file and clean up the code on your page. The cleaner the code the more the search engines like it.

Content – this is basically anything people can see on your website, images, text, video, etc. but is most commonly referring to the text that people read.

H Tags – these are heading tags. They are used to make words the heading of a topic, paragraph or page stand out by varying the sizes and making them bold. These carry more weight with the search engines (unless you over use them) the lower the number the larger it makes the text and the more weight it carries with the search engines. They go from H1 to H6 with H1 being the largest and most important. The appearance of these can be changed through CSS style sheets while still keeping the relevance of the H tag for the search engines.

Keyword or Keyword Phrase – this is the specific word or word phrase that you are using to describe your website, business or service that you want to show up in the search engines. Ideally these are terms that your potential customers will search for to find you.

Keyword Density – this is actually a percentage for the number of appearances of your keyword. You take the number of words in a page and divide it by the number of times your keyword shows up. This used to carry a lot of weight with the search engines but with the use of latent semantic indexing it more often hurts your ranking for having your keyword too often instead of helping you. Your keyword should be included in your page and in your title but if you hear anyone tell you to use it X% of the time run.

Keyword Research – finding what keywords are being searched for your business and defining which are most likely to bring people to your website. This is usually done with the aid of a software program or by extensive manual research. The manual research (if done properly) usually provides the best results while the software programs give you a good place to start. Using the right keywords can make the difference between success and failure of a web site.

Keyword Stuffing – this is where you repeat your keyword numerous times in a title, anchor text, alt tag, description or almost anywhere else to try to help your placement in the search engines. This technique worked when I first started doing SEO (1997) but it doesn’t work any more and if you abuse it you will actually be penalized. Do not put your keyword anywhere, other than you main content, more than twice and in some places no more than once.

Latent Semantic Indexing – LSI – this is just a fancy term for similar terms. The search engines have learned to expect similar terms when ever you talk about a specific topic and these terms can help your website rank higher. For example: if a webpage is about a car the term horse power, power steering and custom paint are all similar terms and work well in a promotion for a type of car; in a different way airplane, train and bus are similar terms and would work well with a keyword phrase about transportation. The more related your key terms are the higher you will rank in the search engines.

Long Tail Keywords – this is a keyword phrase that consists of three or more keywords that are used to describe your business. These are usually the easiest to rank highly in the search engines.

Meta Tags – These are little snippets of code that go into your webpage but aren’t shown on the webpage itself. They are designed to be read by spiders and robots used by the search engines and directory services to collect information. The only two you need to worry about for SEO are description and keyword meta tags. Any others won’t hurt but they won’t help either.

Natural Results – when talking about search engine results these results that you don’t pay for. Most search engines have sponsored results on the pages when you do a search. These are usually marked as sponsored results and most of the time they have a different colored background. The sponsored results are paid for and can be quite effective but they can also be quite costly if you aren’t careful.

On Site Optimization – this is optimizing your site pages themselves to turn up in the search engines using the other terms used here, such as title tags, meta tags, H tags and other methods.

One Way Links – these are backlinks that come directly to your site with out you reciprocating in any way. This is the most valuable of the backlinks as far as the search engines are concerned.

Off Site Optimization – this is a method of building your search engine ranking by developing backlinks preferably with targeted anchor text.

Organic Results – another term for natural results

Reciprocal Links – these are backlinks where you enter into an agreement with another website where you put a link to their site and they put a link to your site. These don’t carry as much weight with the search engines as one way links.

Search Engine Optimization – SEO – This is using various methods to get your website to turn up in the search engines when people search for specific words. In other words, if you want to be the first result that people see on Google or Yahoo! when they search the term, “starting steps” you need to make sure that your website is optimized for the keyword “starting steps”

Search Engine Response Pages – SERP’s – this is the number of pages that turn up in the search engine when you search a specific term. It is usually listed at the top of search engine page and says something like “Showing 1 – 10 of 2,384,000.

Three Way Links – these are backlinks a lot like reciprocal links where you enter an agreement with numerous other websites and you point your links at one website but they don’t necessarily point a link back at your site. For example if you have three sites (hence the name) Site A links to Site B. Site B links to Site C and Site C links to Site A this gives the appearance of one way links which the search engines prefer.

Title Tag – While this is often considered a meta tag it is actually a HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) tag that puts the title of the page in the top of your browser. This is a very important tag for search engine optimization because, if used properly, it defines the topic of your page.

White Hat SEO – this is the term for using current commonly acceptable methods of search engine optimization. The reason I use the term current is because search engine change their algorithm and their rules when they catch anyone using Black Hat methods and unfortunately this can affect people that are doing everything the right way. White Hat SEO techniques are usually more work and more time consuming but if done properly will get your site to the top of the search engines and it should stay there for a long time.

XML SiteMap – this is a file that is for the search engines that provides them with information on when your site is updated and how important you think your information is. This is a good way to let the search engines know you have new content.

No related posts.