Search engine optimisation (SEO) has been a proven way to help funnel potential customers to websites. Read on to see some steps your business can take to capitalise on SEO.
By the myBusiness techblog team
Having and maintaining a presence online is not only necessary, but essential to the success of your small business. The bigger your presence online, the better your SEO will be. Read on to see how you can improve the SEO of your website and rankings in the major search engines.
1. Use good content to earn backlinks
Most small business owners like you will know that a large percentage of your search engine rankings are the result of backlinks. So pragmatically, you might ask, “where can I buy some?” The answer here is to never purchase backlinks. The best backlinks are earned, through good content marketing.
We’ve all heard that “content is king,” but what does that really mean? Your website must contain engaging content for your readers—the importance of this can’t be overstated, as it will impact time-on-site, conversion and SEO. Thin content leaves a bad footprint, both on-site and off-site. Quality content containing humour, information, controversy, politics or training usually brings backlinks—and is definitely considered acceptable SEO.
2. Know your backlink profile
Small businesses should also be aware of their backlink profiles. Healthy businesses market their brands through press releases and are discussed in forums by name, leaving a good footprint. Articles with a single anchored link to a website with low domain authority are bad, as search engines like Google can spot these insubstantial articles and weighs the links accordingly, or worse.
3. To get a Quality Link, offer something valuable in return
One way to gain a good backlink to your website is to create original, worthwhile content that contains an anchor text or other link to your site, and to offer that content to another site. For example, you could write a guest post on a blog relevant to your industry and add a backlink to your site in the post. This practice is acceptable, and free keyword tools such as Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Insights for Search can help you determine which specific keywords and search phrases to focus on.
4. Make sure your website is search engine friendly
Most platform-hosted websites already do this automatically, but if you have a custom-built website, you need to think about your folder structure, site map, and HTML readability. Don’t obsess too much over making the graphics layout look visually appealing. If your site is heavy on Flash, make sure that text-based descriptions are included in the HTML to help search engine bots. You might also want to consider removing your splash or welcome page, and build a homepage with descriptions and pointers to main content areas of your site.
5. Make a list of keywords
Start by jotting down the three or four terms you would use to search for your website. Next, run the searches on a search engine, and for each query try to find what position your website has in the results. Stop if you can’t find it after ten pages—if you can find it by then, no one else will either. Next, see if you can break the list into three buckets:
- Lower rank, great keyword, low competition – This is the perfect place to start. Put these terms at the top of your priority list. You should see the best results on this set first.
- Lower rank, great keyword, high competition – Another great opportunity, but unless you feel your business can take on competition directly, it could be more costly in the long run to start here unless you have a higher performing base of keywords.
- Higher rank, great keyword – The good news is that you’re already doing awesome here, but you should continue to track performance just in case. You can always come back to this group later if you’re still not satisfied with the results.
By this time, you should have two or three keywords that are at the top of your priority list. The last step is to ensure your homepage contains a text description with 2 or 3 of those top keywords.
For small business sites with typically only one main page, make sure that you add a couple of sentences that naturally describe your business, and weave in the top three keywords. To gauge the success of these keywords, keep an eye on your site ranking to see if there is upward movement.
Using the tips above can help increase your website’s presence online so that your webpage is ranked highly by the major search engines. So don’t hesitate, and give them a try!
Have you performed SEO tweaks to your website lately? Please share your experiences with us in the comment box below.