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Basic SEO For Small Business Owners

January 3, 2010

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.

While many small businesses have Websites, very few are optimized so that local customers can find them. But the blame really can’t go to the small business person. They’re normally so caught up in the day to day operation of their business that they have no time to learn how to optimize their site. The tips below will help you optimize your small business website so that you can rank higher in the search engines. I asked a Guaranteed Houston SEO consultant how he managed to rank so many sites in Google’s top 10. It’s simple he said. Then he gave me the following tips.

Start by removing any music or flash components you might have on your website. I know, I know, your web designer said you needed those. Or you thought they looked cool. 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. 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.

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. Don’t overdo it and make your page look spammy. Web users hate spammy looking content. Image is everything. Any good Internet Marketing consultant will tell you that!

Now we get to the meat of SEO. Linkbuilding. 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. Relevant anchor text is the single most important thing about SEO’ing your website. 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. 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

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