SEO is all about getting your site returned as high up in the search engines results as possible. This means making the relevant keywords that are being used in a users search match the content of your site.
When it comes to small business seo there are a variety of options but usually only one makes good business sense. The first is to hire a professional SEO consultant, this should bring you good results but SEO campaigns take time and a lot of small businesses won’t have the monthly budget to take this option. The next is to hire a cheap SEO, this may seem like a good idea but read on and you’ll see why you should think twice about this option. You could just do no SEO but that will mean you’ll miss out on exposure and ultimately miss out on new custom, this is not a great choice. Finally you could do it yourself, a little time spent on your SEO each week will soon add up and pay off for your business.
There is a lot of conflicting information about SEO and those who are looking to buy SEO services should first become aware of the potential dangers and risks that choosing the wrong SEO can bring as well the right questions to ask to ensure you find a good SEO who will look after your business needs.
This article is just a brief overview that I hope will make you aware of how SEO works, SEO is a very in depth subject so consider this a crash course!
First Things First First
Your actual page content needs to be optimised to be seen as relevant and quality pages by the search engines. Search engines like accessible, relevant and fresh information so your site must provide these to maximise your SEO campaign effectiveness.
There are certain technical “Gotchas” that can harm your sites ranking so be sure to be familiar with the webmaster guidelines provided by Google and follow best practices. The golden rule is to write for people, not search engines!
The search engines want what is best for the users search, they want to return a choice of useful sites that are relevant to the search term, and your site needs to offer this to be loved by both people and search engines! This also means making sure your site is accessible and loads fast as well as providing well written and useful content. SEO may get your site seen but quality content will bring return visits!
It’s worth spending time getting the onsite SEO right, pay attention to the sites title and description and make good use of your main keywords in these. Repeat these keywords throughout the content but make sure they are relevant to the context of the page!
Link Building
Once your sites pages are optimised it’s time to look at building links to your site. Links are helpful in two ways, first they can share a little page rank with you from the site that links to you. This can help build your sites authority.
Also the anchor text and text surrounding the link can help the engines figure out how relevant your webpage is. Anchor text that matches your pages title, description and content will boost the relevance of that word or phrase and help your site climb the ranks for those keywords. Links are seen as recommendations by the search engines, if I link to you then I am effectively saying have a look at this site.
Google uses a page rank system to determine the authority of sites, this goes from 0 to 10. Many factors help determine page rank but generally well established sites with lots of incoming links have a good page rank. This system isn’t as important as it used to be but still plays a big part, keeping up your link building over time will help your page rank increase.
Google only releases a few page rank updates to webmasters each year but behind the scenes it is continually updating the page rank of sites. Once you have a decent page rank you can then compete for more competitive terms. Until you reach pr3 or above then targeting less competitive keywords might be best.
You get what You Pay For!
You can get backlink campaigns done very cheaply, this can be tempting but you should view these with caution. These cheap services usually rely on blackhat methods that could violate Googles webmaster guidelines and end up harming your sites rankings.
This content is usually low quality, machine created and not unique. The latest Google updates specifically target and penalise this kind of content, avoid it at all costs! Also bear in mind that if too many backlinks are created in a short time period this can look highly suspicious and unnatural to a search engine, especially if your site is new or has a low page rank.
Often these links will also come from spammy pages and be nested amongst links to adult content which can also have a negative effect on the links value. Remember if the price is cheap then it’s likely they are cutting corners as creating content and quality backlinks takes time and expertise.
Hopefully this has given you a little more insight into the process of SEO and the pitfalls to be avoided, for more SEO tips please visit my blog.
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