Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Basic SEO Tips For Small Business Websites

The three most basic SEO tips are: (a) write to and for your customer because (b) if you write interesting content people will voluntarily link to you--Google loves that--and (c) if you don't write to and for your customer, you may be first on Google but you'll be last on closed business. Reciprocal links that are established with any and all comers, regardless of their business relationship to you, are discouraged by Google.

Keep these 3 tenets as the basic focus of your SEO efforts ….

1. Keyword Research is Critical - choose keyword phrases for each page of the site, each page should focus on different content, so therefore have different keywords.

2. Develop Ongoing Content Strategy (blog is easy) - create content around the keywords you are trying to rank for, and be consistent with publishing content, tag this content, and write it using the keywords (naturally though, don't try to hard with this).

3. Focus on Relevance in Your Content - you can optimize your site all you want, but in the end it's a matter of how relevant you are to the searchers queries. Blogging will contribute to your site being indexed more frequently, so if you stay relevant, you have a greater opportunity to rank higher.

At a very high level, SEO is comprised of linking, on page/meta data content, and other website mechanics (e.g. redirects, trusted URL, etc.). IMHO the page content aspect of SEO is the most crucial.

Start by examining your keywords. Most companies underestimate the importance of this exercise. From a marketing standpoint, nailing your keywords and phrases is the foundation for your online marketing communications and content strategy.

Here’s a link to a newsletter on keyword selection where you can download a worksheet to help you decide on the right keywords …..

Keyword Selection

Then make sure your website pages are optimized for the keywords and phrases—and not all on one page. Group your keywords and phrases so that any given page is optimized for 3-5 keywords. Make sure that your meta title tags and description especially included the 3-5 keywords/phrases for which you’re optimizing a given page.

For more about page content, see this article on boosting natural page rank ….

Boosting Page Rank

Finally, connect with the SEO experts. Follow them on Twitter and subscribe to their blog posts. There’s a Twitter list of SEO folks already set up at @copywriter4u/B2B-SEO-pros …. go follow the list.

Below are a few links with information on good SEO content.

High Rankings

Interleado

SEOMOZ

Search Engine Land

SEO Traffic Spider