SEO Tips For Small Business Owners
For many small businesses, these hard economic times have been a make it or break it time. The price of everything is going up. This includes advertising. It’s getting harder and harder to find affordable advertising that actually has a decent ROI. 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.
Most small business websites are not optimized to target local customers. If the truth were known, most small business owners are too busy running their businesses to learn how to optimize their site. What’s worse, they may have paid good money to a so called SEO expert and be thinking their website is alread optimized when it isn’t. If you find that this is the case for you, here are some tips to optimize your website so it will rank higher in the search engines. The best SEO advice I ever recieved was from a Tulsa SEO expert who turned me on to the tips below.
Start by making your website user friendly. Remove all flash components or Javascript code that isn’t necessary. And no, your cool look Flash movie isn’t necessary. These components are not necessary for an optimized website. In fact, Flash and Javascript can actually hurt your SEO efforts. Every web user study I’ve seen says that these two components turn off the web user or distracts them from the real reason they visited your site in the first place. To buy something or find out more information about your products and services. Plus, search engines can not read Flash or Javascript code, so they add absolutely no SEO benefit to your Website. Ditch them.
You want to make sure that the main keyword that describes your business is in the Title of the main page. By failing to put your keywords in the Title, you failing to take advantage of a very important rule of SEO. Let’s say your name is Bob and you sell Widgets. Don’t put Bob’s Emporium in the Title, even if that is really what your business name is. Your Title should tell people what your business does.
Every page of your site should be about another aspect of your business. Following the example I gave you above, your widget store might have pages that look like this; Bob’s Widget Outlet, Bob’s Groovy Widgets, Bob’s Round Widgets, etc.
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. Don’t overdo it and make your page look spammy. That can get you into trouble with the search engines and make it look spammy to visitors. The last thing you want is to have to hire a Online Reputation Management 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 (if you can) that all links use anchor text. Instead of using the words ‘Click Here’ as the hypertext link, use keywords that describe your site as the hypertext link. Ideally, every link that goes to your site should be in anchor text. Never use the same anchor text over and over. Change it up a bit. It looks more natural when different anchor text is used to describe your site.
And that’s it. these tips will do wonders for your small business website if you’ll just take the time to do them. If you’re unsure about how to go about it, then search for a SEO Specialist that does know how. Just be sure you get one that will not take your money and run!
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