Here are 7 tips small business owners can consider when working on search engine optimization (seo) for their websites.
Determine what keywords your customers are using to find someone like you. Get some ideas by asking your friends and colleagues what terms they would use to find someone like you.
Every page in your website should have a single theme that relates to one of the keywords from #1 above. Create a Title Tag (80 characters or less) that describess that theme, and then place that Title Tag in the right place on each web-page.
Minimize flash and javascript files in your web-page code as these are obstacles that search engines have to overcome when indexing your web-pages. This doesn’t mean you have to avoid them altogether – just use them sparingly.
Check to see if your website is indexed by the search engine. Go to the Google search bar and type in site:yourdomainname and click Search. For example, if your website address (domain name) is findme.com, then type into the Google search bar site:www.findme.com. Google will give you a list of entries. If you don’t see all your web-pages, that means they are not indexed by Google and someone won’t find them when doing a search.
A big part of good search engine rankings is how many other websites are linking to you. To find out, go to Yahoo search bar and type in link:www.yourdomainname. Yahoo will give you a list of links coming to your site. If you are competing for search engine placement with some other company, check their links as well. The more links and the better quality links, the better your search positioning will be.
Get Google Analytics (GA) added to your website. GA is easy to use and provides a ton of information about search engines and visitor behaviors.
Consult with a professional SEO specialist. SEO isn’t easy and there’s a lot of hard work involved. If you aren’t ready to pay for a full-blown SEO project to get you top rankings on the first page of Google, then contract with an SEO consultant who can guide you down a path of doing it yourself. .
Sorry couldn’t resist that title but I was getting frustrated with having to navigate through Basecamp every time I wanted to update some recorded time. Basecamp really is a very cool time recording tool and to be honest I’m not entirely sure (off the top of my head at least) how 37 Signals could make it easier but I needed to find a quicker way of completing my timesheet.
So I did a little Googling and discovered timy. What an incredibly neat little app. timy uses an Adobe AIR run-time and is available for PC, Mac and some Linux distributions. It’s simple to use; one basically synchronizes timy with Basecamp which in turn makes all your projects/clients available for selection in the preferences section (bottom right of the app). Once you select any given client, you can then simply access this client/project on the left side of the main page.
You can drag-n-drop the client/project to any particular day of the week and then very quickly add the amount of time to be recorded then hit save. It’s really that simple and boy has it saved me tons of back and forth from my little Word pad desktop file at the end of each week.
“Web analytics packages are sold as if it’s an automatic coffee marker. In fact, it’s more like buying a coffee plantation.
You can still get your coffee (eventually), but you’re going to have to stick your hands in a lot more manure than you ever knew.”
- Tom Cunniff
Web analytics software is free. Data is cheap. The return on insightful analysis that ultimately drives key decisions can be worth it’s weight in gold.
Does not being able to measure your ROI for a given investment make other, more accountable advertising options the smarter choice? You would think so, but there is a reason why businesses have been investing in traditional methods of advertising for decades (and still do). Maybe it’s because it was the only thing available years ago, but in today’s world understanding your own personal tolerance for risk is the greater issue.
Your billboard, television, print, and radio consultants will most assuredly provide you with metrics relating to visibility and penetration, making broad assumptions relating to conversions or actual sales. But at the end of the day most business owners that I talk to answer with “I’m not sure” when I ask them what their ROI is for their creative advertising. Now I’m not here to say you shouldn’t be investing in creative advertising; for most businesses the right portfolio should really be the goal.
A lot has been lost when it comes to the argument between web advertising and creative advertising. Creative consultants say that web advertising is expensive and complicated. Web consultants say that creative isn’t accountable and can also be extremely expensive. I’m here to say that business owners need to come to terms with the strengths of both. Make a decision to effectively manage the risks involved and diversify your portfolio (just like any other investment).
If I know that television advertising isn’t going to provide me an exact ROI for my dollar, but I know it helps grow my business, that’s fine. I’m not saying any traditional business should be doing 100% web or 100% creative; my submission would be to decide how much of your portfolio you want to be accountable and how much of it you want to be simply “proven”. Come to terms with your comfort level regarding how measurable you’d like your investments to be and make smart decisions.
Today, Google unveiled their new real-time search feature. It’s still very new, even in internet terms, but what we see in the video below as well as in our own field tests is that results populate starting from when the search results page loads (so to take advantage of the new opportunity for visibility, it’s a “right place at the right time” kind of thing). Most of these results are tweets or recently crawled articles/blogs on the topic. Our tests have shown tweets to show up with about a 10-20 second delay from when they were originally published. Not bad.
So how can SEO’s use this to their advantage? In a white hat world, you would say, “it forces people to keep generating content and conversation around the topic they want to show for in Google search results.” In a black hat world, one might contrive methods for abusing the new feature using automated tweeting applications. For example, you could schedule keyphrase stuffed tweets to post relentlessly to guarantee almost constant visibility. I’d bet good money Google’s algorithm has parameters in place to weed out this kind of spamming, so I’m optimistic it won’t be that much of a problem.
When used correctly, I have no doubt something like real-time search will reward those who are active on social platforms and especially those who post content regularly. Wait, did I just say Google will reward those who post fresh content frequently? This sounds so familiar.
but I was getting frustrated with having to navigate through Basecamp every time I wanted to update some recorded time. Basecamp really is a very cool time recording tool and to be honest I’m not entirely sure (off the top of my head at least) how 37 Signals could make it easier but I needed to find a quicker way of completing my timesheet.