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. What a lot of small business owners miss is that they already have a resource that can bring in loads of new customers. And it’s sitting right under their nose. It’s their 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. 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.
One place to start is the usability of your website. Begin by removing flash movies or any music you might have imbedded on your site. 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.
Next, make sure your main title reflects what your business is about. If you own a widget store, don’t simply call it ‘My Store’. If you own Bob’s Widget Company, then those three words should be in the Title of the main page.
Every page of your site should be about another aspect of your business. In the example above, you may have pages on Bob’s Blue Widgets, Bob’s Discount Widgets, Bob’s Widgets For Kids, etc. Each of those pages should have Titles that describe what the page is about.
Next, you want to make sure that the specific keywords are in the content of your page. Sounds simple but I see this mistake all the time. Normally using the keyword 2 to 3 times on the page is sufficient. Whatever you do, don’t go overboard with this step. It will make your page look spammy. Web users hate spammy looking content. The last thing you want is to have to hire a Houston Online Reputation Management company to clean up your online reputation after you ruined it!
Next, it’s all about the links. Incoming links to your site is what will get you ranked high. Use anchor text links when you start building links back to your site. For example, it’s not enough for someone to have Click Here as a link to your site. You need a link that says Bob’s Widgets or another relevant term describing your page. Any link pointing to your pages should have the keywords as the anchor text of the link. Make sure you change up the anchor text also. Having all the same anchor text links pointing to your site will get you penalized by Google. It’s known as Googlebombing.
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!