Small Business Tools Pro

The number one goal for any website, online franchise or local business is to attract more visitors or leads every day. A simple equation we should all be familiar with:

MORE VISITORS + MORE SALES = MORE PROFIT

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the art (or science) of optimizing your web content (websites, videos and pictures) for search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing so that your services or products rank higher for specific keywords in the Search Engine Results (SERPS).

Wikipedia describes SEO as “the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”)”.

Let’s consider an example. I’m looking for a web designer for a new company I’m launching so the first thing I’m likely to do is visit Google and type “web designer london”. By searching with my keyword I’ve asked the search engines to return what it thinks are the most relevant (targeted) results  in relation to my search query “web designer London”

The search engine then gets to work using  it’s algorithm to decide which are the best results to return based on your keyword query.

Data released by experts broadly suggest 42% of people click on the number one returned result, 12% click on the second results, 8.5% on the third and the number gets significantly lower as you move down the results.

Objective

It’s fairly obvious then that if you are looking for people to find your services online your core objective would be to rank higher for a particular keyword which best describes your product or services. This is where SEO comes into play. Eg, If you run a small bakery in New York you would want to rank for the keyword “new york bakery”.

While there are many hundreds of  techniques or factors that affect SEO, two are likely to increase a websites ranking:

• How well the website pages are optimized for the keyword (on-page)
• How many other websites link to that website based on the keyword (off-page).

The websites that are the most optimized for a specific keyword and have the most backlinks (links to other websites) will be perceived by the search engines to have the most relevant content and will more than likely be ranked higher in the SERPS.

Optimizing

Optimising your websites for SEO involves (among many other things) applying emphasis and more importance to your keywords within your content. This can be done by including your keyword, “website design London” in the heading of a title in your page, or in the keywords meta tag description, and by bolding or italicising keywords in your articles.  All this helps to inform the search engines which words or phrases should be noted (and ranked for) above the others.

Backlinking is the process of linking to your website from other websites, preferably from a site that the search engines believe to hold some authority (indicated by a higher Page Rank score). It also helps to have other websites that relate to your own market linking back to your site as this suggests your own content is relevant.

Definitions

Courtesy of SEO Dictionary here are some common definitions:

On page SEO - refers to the text and content on your web site pages. Basically editing your page and content so the search engine can find your webpage
Off page SEO - refers to the text and “inbound” linking from OTHER web site pages to your web site pages.
Anchor text – Anchor text is the text that you click on to activate and follow a hyperlink to another web page or another web site.
Backlinks - A link to your site from another website. A natural backlink is a good way to gain online authority.
Page Rank - As defined by Google “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.

Anatomy of a SERP

A typical search engine results page is divided into four regions. The top region (1) shows the search query that was used to initiate the search. The regions highlighted (2 & 3) define PPC Paid Advertising (Pay Per Click) results. These are adverts that people are paying Google to display. The main region of search results (4) are referred to as the organic search results and this is where you want to be featuring your company.

The entry that appears first in the organic results is said to possess the much coveted “number 1 spot in Google”.

SEO is for most people a complicated topic and is something that certainly requires a well conceived strategic approach. For those that enjoy a challenge you won’t mind wrapping your head around the intricacies of search engine optimization but for most small business owners I suspect they’ll be wondering how they can outsource this seemingly tedious process.

There are more SEO software solutions coming to market now than ever before but before going out to buy the latest solution its worth understanding the basic concepts involved and then deciding which solution bests suits your small business needs. Your decision to adopt a SEO strategy will depend on your necessity to rank in the search engines and of course your budget.

I hope you now have a basic understanding of what search engine optimization is and what an important small business tool this potentially is.

I will be delving deeper into SEO in future posts and will be revealing some basic tips to show you how you can optimize on page factors for your website.

Are you looking for help with your small business SEO? We’ll will be offering SEO services from here in the near future