- Add Relevant Text Content
You absolutely have to have rich content on your site that clearly relates to your products/services. Who is your target audience? Make sure your website is geared to their interests. The search engines do not exist to help you market your business. They exist to provide the most relevant links to sites that the user is searching for.
- Choose your keywords like a customer
What search words or phrases would you use in Google to find a company like yours? Think like a possible customer. What are they typing in to find someone like you? It’s probably not your company’s name. It’s probably not terminology and jargon that only insiders in your industry would recognize. Make sure the content on your website is rich with information for that audience and includes those key words and phrases.
- Think Local Search
Many people narrow their search by adding a ZIP code, a city name, county, state or an area code to their search terms. Include these geographic limiters to your site in the page titles, keywords and page descriptions as well as in the text content on the pages. Be sure to have your contact information on every page of your site. And have a link to a locator map if you have a business address. Add your phone and address information to your key words and phrases. Including your ZIP code.
- MARKET your site
You’d be surprised how many people don’t have their website address on their business cards. It should be on every printed piece that represents your company: business cards, letterhead, invoices, flyers, advertising, receipts, product tags, tradeshow giveaways etc.
- Add Linkbait to your site
Add Tips and Tricks, or Top Ten lists. Add widgets or calculators that are useful to your customers. Add a Glossary of Terms that are commonly used in your industry. Include FAQs with great answers. Consider having a coupon on your website so that online visitors will have an incentive to purchase your goods and services. Then market the fact that you’ve got a discount coupon online. Create your own flow of traffic!
- Practice Safe Linking
Include links to your partners, distributors, associations, awards, related info, etc. And ask these people to put a link to YOUR site on their web page. The inbound links to your site are very useful. And you are offering your partners a very valuable trade by listing their link. But don’t join a linkfarm or web ring. Looks unprofessional and can get you blacklisted by the search engines.
- Make sure your web designer knows what she’s doing
The code on your pages needs to be compliant with standards and should be compatible across browser types and platforms (operating systems). The part of your website that you CANNOT SEE is just as important as the visual part that everyone does see.
- Search spiders need help getting around
Navigation needs to be logical, clear and consistent. Don’t you hate to get lost on a confusing website? Don’t do that to your visitors or they’ll be gone in a click. Flash menus and fancy JavaScript menus are a roadblock to search spiders because they can’t see the links within that code.
- Make every page count
Avoid the once-popular “entry” page to your site. It’s just another click for your visitors to get to the important info they are really looking for. And if you MUST have an entry page, please don’t make it FLASH! Make sure it has lots of text related to your key words.
- Text: because we can’t emphasize it too much…
All of the important text on your site needs to be… text. Search engines cannot “read” graphics, Flash or photos. Even when there is text in them.
- And more text…
All your photos and graphics need text tags (ALT attributes) so that search engines can identify them and visitors who are visually impaired can hear the description of what they are.
- The single most important element you can optimize is the Page Title
Every page on your website has a page name and a page title. The page name should be descriptive and can include key words and it is very important for the page title to do so also. The title of this page is “Search Engine Optimization Tips - 13 Things You Can Do for FREE” which tells the search engines much more than if the page title were “Welcome”.
- Have patience!
No matter WHAT you do, if your site is a new domain, it can take MONTHS before it starts to show up in Google.
By: admin | 2008/01/22 | Search Engine Optimization for Small Business | Trackback | Comments [RSS 2.0]
