jump to navigation

SEO Tips For Your Small Business Website July 18, 2010

Posted by admin in : SEO , comments closed

If you run a small business and are in the process of establishing your online presence, you will want to keep several SEO related factors in mind. Search engine optimisation is an important part in the creation of any web content because it determines the ranking of the various pages on or related to your website. For you, the small business owner, this is especially important because you are not as large as the big corporations and probably don’t have the advertising budget that some of them do to throw in to promoting yourself both on and offline.

The best part of Internet advertising is the many free opportunities that are available to raise awareness and drive traffic to your site. Below are a few SEO tips that will help get you started.

Your website design is just as important as the business itself. If you have a physical location where products are sold or services are offered and are building a website to supplement your already existing business, your site should reflect the business you currently operate. If the business will be operated solely online, your site should represent who you are and what you offer in a way that keeps it all fresh and unique. Don’t be afraid to spend money on developing your site. If you aren’t able to build it yourself, consider finding someone who can. It will be an investment that was well worth the thought and time put into it, not to mention the money.

Site usability is another important consideration. While the site should look great, it is no good to you or anyone else if it is difficult to navigate. Placement is an important part of SEO and should not be ignored. The various elements of your site should be placed in such a way that makes them both aesthetically appealing and easy to use. If people have trouble completing a purchase they will not return to look at additional products. This is why site design and usability go hand in hand.

Site hosting is another important aspect of SEO. If you can’t afford to host your site it will not go up. The good news is the prices of hosting has come down quite a bit over the last few years so it shouldn’t be difficult to find a company to do this for you. When choosing a host, you want to select a company who will keep your site up and running as well as provide you with technical support when a problem occurs. The support you receive should be immediate. You don’t want to encounter a problem with the site on Monday and not have it resolved until Friday. This would mean active and potential customers could not access it for five days which could prove to be a monumental disaster where your business is concerned. Regarding SEO, you also would not want people to find your site through search engines only to find it unavailable when they click on the link to go there. If this happens, many users would deem it out of action and would not be likely to try again.

Creating a unique site that will sell your business is important, but SEO should not be ignored. The content is just as important as the appearance because it is the main aspect that the search engines pay attention to when ranking each page. The more smoothly the site is running, the more time you will have to pay attention to optimising the content and achieving higher rankings.

Google PageRank Calculator Tool February 7, 2010

Posted by admin in : SEO , comments closed

Here’s another neat little tool on the Web that I’ve been putting to good use. It’s called ThinkBling, and it’s a Google PageRank calculator.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, a webpage’s Google PageRank provides a rough estimate of its “desirability” to the Google Search engine. Basically, the higher the PageRank that a webpage has, the more likely it will be to pop up on a keyword search done by someone using the Google Search Engine. There are a lot of calculator’s out there, but this one I’ve found to be the friendliest to use. You simply enter up to 50 webpage URLs and the ThinkBling PageRank calculator quickly determines the PageRank of each webpage, and returns those value to you. It couldn’t be simpler, and provides you with a great starting point on how your website is doing in the Search Engine wars.

Your Google PageRank is a great indicator of how easily people will be able to find your site. You may have built a great looking site with excellent content, but if no one can find it, it won’t do your business nearly as much good as it could. I liken it to building a grand casino or retail superstore in the middle of a cornfield, 100 miles from the nearest town and with no roads leading to it. That’s the real world analogy to an attractive website with a low PageRank.

You can use the PageRank calculator to determine what pages on your site need work, to appear higher in the search rankings. There are many things that go into getting your pages to have a high listing during a keyword search-applicable content is obviously important, as well as keyword density. But relevant links into a page is critical for a high PageRank, and something everyone should be working on, if they’re not already. The discussion on improving your site’s SEO is a long and somewhat complex discussion (way too complex and detailed for this article). However, everyone should become aware of its importance to their company’s business, and find out where they stand. Only by knowing where you stand can you then learn what changes can improve your rankings. The stakes of doing a good job on SEO are huge-and ThinkBling’s Advanced Google PageRank Checker is a great place to start. I recommend you give it a test spin!

I’ll be providing information on more Internet Marketing tools in upcoming articles. Until then, let me know if you find something that you think I should review.

SEO Hints on How to Optimize a Website – Advanced SEO Tips February 6, 2010

Posted by admin in : internet , comments closed

If you learn how to optimize a web page properly using these SEO hints and tips, then you will never have to pay for traffic again. The profit that your visitors bring you will go straight into your bank account.

You no doubt understand all the basic stuff, but in case you are new to this, let’s first have look at these basic SEO hints and tips, since many seem to omit them from their web pages. The most important are the HTML tags that are used by search engines to determine the relevance of your page to the search term used by the search engine’s customer.

Note the term ‘web page’, because many people don’t realize that Google, along with most other search engines, doesn’t list websites, but individual web pages. It is essential that you understand how search engines work if you want to learn how to optimize a web page.

I am going to refer to Google, not only because it is the biggest of the search engines, but also to save the bother of referring to search engines all the time. I will refer to Google, but take that as meaning search engines in general. Here are the main SEO basics:

a) The TITLE tag. This appears in the HEAD portion of your html, and is not actually seen by your visitors but is the most important tag on your web page because the spiders place very high weight to it. Use your main keywords here, and also any other text that will inform Google of the theme of your web page.

b) Heading (H) tags. Your page title should be placed within H1 tags, and should contain the same major keyword as you used in the TITLE tag. Your subheadings, if any, should be bracketed with H2 tags. I don’t use any of the lower tags, from H3 down, except perhaps H3 very occasionally. Any text with H tags will be regarded by Google as of specific importance, and most weight will be given to the lower numbers (H1 and H2). Don’t place eberything within H1 tags, or that will reduce its emphasis and Google will ignore the tag.

c) Text enhancements: Use bold, italic and underline enhancements sparingly, and where you one again want to stress the importance of certain keywords.

d) Your keyword density should be concentrated in the first third of your web page. Don’t use too many: I get good results with under 1% overall keyword density, but using the main keyword in the first 100 characters, once in the last paragraph and once more each 300 words but concentrated in the first third of the page. Thus, an 800 word page will have the keyword three times in the first 250 words and once in the last paragraph.

e) Meta tags: the only meta tag worth using is the description tag, which is used by most search engines in the description of your web page in their listings. Google mainly uses it exactly as you write it. The keyword tag can also be used, but few search engines are thought to use it: Google does not. Any other meta tags are a waste of your space. Anybody that claims differently is wanting to sell you something.

These are the basic hints on SEO, now here are some of the more advanced SEO hints and tips that will teach you not only how to optimize a web page, but to understand the way that search engines work. These are less obvious, and generally not used by beginners to search engine marketing.

f) You should use text links from one page to another on your siet. Search engine spiders love text, and fancy graphics or java links might look great, but don’t get you kudos from the spiders. Stick to text if you want a good listing: there’s no point in fancy graphical links if you have no visitors to use them.

g) IT will benefit to you use as liuttle code as possible on each web page compared to the amount of text: maximise your text:code ratio. Your code to text ratio should be minimized as far as possible because . . . yes, you’ve got it! Spiders love text!

h) Another good SEO tip is to focus on your off-page linking. It is possible to get a #1 spot on Google with no content: just loads of links coming into your web page from other websites. Not just any websites, but authority sites, so reciprocal links to and from web pages not directly related to your niche are a waste of time, and can even harm you. Link farms can positively damage you.

i) Use anchor text for your links where at all possible. Google shouldn’t have to work out what your web page is about: tell them. Hyperlink your keyword to your website, but don’t use the same form of keyword from every webpage linking to yours. Mix them about so as to keep the links fresh.

j) And lastly: keep adding pages to your website. A single website containing 80 pages will likly provide you with more visitors that two of 40 pages due to a higher overall Google listing from the former as compared to both of the 40 page sites. Refresh your content frequently by adding new pages, but don’t ignore your older pages: rdevise these now and again with new vocabulary. Google detests stagnation.

These are just a few SEO hints and tips that can teach you how to optimize a web page. There are many, many more. Some quite basic, others very much more advanced than the above. However, you can’t get everything free!