SEO for Small Businesses

Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process, and should be considered to be a part of your overall marketing effort. In fact, it's marketing directed at a very specific market - the search engines and their algorithms that scour the Internet for information to return to people for a search. By building your site in such a way that the search engines can easily read your content and figure out what you do, you increase the number of eyes that can find your website exponentially. With a well thought out and directed plan, you will bring more potential customers to your website.

This article will discuss a number of techniques you can use to improve the performance of your website in the search engines, some of the basic concepts of search engine rankings, and then a brief discussion of what to look for when hiring an SEO consultant. The single most important factor in search engine rankings is the ability of a search engine to read your website. Search engines use "spiders" to go out and read the internet. These spiders are computer programs, and as such, they only read text. That means, if you have a Flash based website, while it may be nice and have fancy animations the search engines have no idea what it's about. That's cutting off a large chunk of your potential customers, and is something you should think carefully about before purchasing a Flash site.

The Basics

Search engines rank websites based on dozens, or even hundreds, of factors. Many of those are beyond your direct control, such as age of domain. For some obvious reasons, domains or websites that have been active for a long time are more "trusted" by search engines, because the longer a site exists, the less chance there is that it's something thrown up as a short-lived spam website. However, there are a number of factors that you can control to improve your rankings.

Here is a short list of some of the most important ones, that can be easily changed:

• Keywords in the domain name
• Keywords in the URL
• Keywords in Title or header tags
• Pages structured to focus on a single, well defined topic, and all info on that topic on that page.
• Relevant external links to your website
• Internal linking structure

Keywords

What do I mean by "keywords"? A keyword is a single word or phrase that is something your potential customers will search for, that describes the content of a page. For example, as a web developer, I would want to focus on Keywords like "Web Development", "Web Hosting" and "Custom Programming". Each of those major keywords has a page of its own, which concentrates on that keyword and closely related topics.

It is important to think about your keywords, and the structure of your content. Most small businesses will have one large, overarching keyword or very short phrase that will describe their website. In the MABWI example, that would be "Web Developer". Under that, there are major concepts such as Web design, Web hosting, Internet Marketing and so on. All of those relate to the main concept, and are subordinate to it. Each of those has its own page on the site. This was a deliberate decision, and is something you should think about when building your site architecture.

Page Structure

Each page on your site needs to have a Title, a Heading, and a URL (website address). Each of those things is a big signal to the search engines about what your page is about. That means you should endeavor to have relevant, descriptive terms in each of those areas, that relate to your keywords for that page. It's also important to keep all information about a topic together on one page, so that you don't confuse the search engines with two pages about hosting.

More Advanced Concepts

Keywords and page structure are the absolute basics of what you need to do. SEO goes far beyond those two things, of course. Here we'll discuss some of the more advanced ideas, that may take a little bit of technical knowledge, or a little more work to implement.

Internal Linking

Links matter a lot to search engines. A link within your website is a signal to the engine about what the linked to page talks about. This includes the links in your navigation menus. You should avoid making "click here" the clickable part of a link. Try your best to structure in text links so that the descriptive portion is clickable.

Instead of "Click here for information about MABWI's hosting packages", you can write: "MAB Web Intelligence offers a number of Web hosting packages." Both sentences give the same information, and the links go to the same place. But, the second offers a big clue to the search engine that you're linking to a page about Web Hosting.

External Links

The final piece of the puzzle is external links. That's links from other websites to you. From the search engine's perspective, whenever a site links to another site, it's like a vote. The first website is saying "this other website offers something worth reading". It's almost a way for search engines to apply human eyes to the entire Internet. Of course, once people figured it out, they found ways to game the system, so now search engines are much more discriminating about what links they count. Your goal is to find good websites that are relevant to your business to link to.

There's a lot to consider when evaluating the value of potential links. Some signs of bad links:

• It's on a page of dozens or hundreds of links in a list
• A general directory. (Focused directories - either geographically or by industry - are often pretty good.)
• A completely unrelated site.

How do you get a link? That's the tough part. Usually, the best way is to ask. You may need to trade, so make sure it's a website you don't mind telling the world that you think is pretty good. If you link to too many spammy or bad websites, you could be penalized. You will not be penalized for getting links from spammy sites - but you won't get credit for those links, either. Another common way of getting links - in fact, the original link building method - was creating good content. Give people a reason to link to your site. Produce a piece of compelling content - a blog, a video, an article - really, anything that interests others in your industry, or those with the power to link.

Ultimately, this is just an overview of the basics behind SEO. Each of these topics could fill dozens of posts in detail. The most important thing to keep in mind is that the search engines are trying to rank websites that provide what their customers - the searchers - are trying to find. They want good content, written for humans. As long as you provide that - with some of the additional stuff mentioned above - you will do pretty well.