Most small businesses including home based ones end up with a website, whether to sell products or to catalogue services or just talk about the business. Whether you build it yourself or have it professionally built, your next task is to get people actually using it.
As any web designer who handles small business clients can tell you, there are a huge number of people out there who still believe in the maxim “build it and they will come”. This unfortunately is simply not the case.
Unless your site is one of a small few that deal in the subject matter you are fighting for attention with all the other sites out there that want to get listed for the same search terms entered into a search engine like Google. Even if you are one of a few, you still need to get the search engines to realise you exist.
That is where we start our search engine optimisation journey. So let’s look at what we can do to get listed in Google.
Probably the first thing to realise is that there are many factors involved in how Google chooses to list a site, so many that it is not worth you diverting attention away from your business to learn all about it – it’s a field of its own best left to the experts.
You can however achieve a lot with just a few basic principles!
Basic SEO 1
There is no point trying to get listed for very competitive terms.
Selling shoes on your website? Don’t bother trying to get listed for the search term ‘shoes’. Get really specific and you lessen the competition dramatically. Are you one of just a handful of sites selling ‘pink australian ugg boots’ – great, why not try to get listed for that. Fewer visitors, sure – but they’re more likely to be buyers using specific terms like that.
Basic SEO 2
Write some great content all about your specific topic
Put the best webpage together on the topic you possibly can. Tell everyone why those pink australian ugg boots are so good, put some pics of them on the page, maybe even a little history of pink ugg boots, maybe even a little video clip from Youtube if you can find one.
Basic SEO 3
Use descriptive titles and file names
Optimise (there’s that word…) your page by making the page title ‘Pink Australian Ugg Boots by My Company.com’ and if you can do it, make the url of the page something like ‘mycompany.com/pink-australian-ugg-boots.html’.
If you can name those pictures you put on the page ‘pink-australian-ugg-boots.jpg’ and ‘best-australian-pink-ugg-boots.jpg’ even better. Same thing goes for the image alt tags if you can work out how give them alt attributes.
Basic SEO 4
Beg, borrow or steal links from other sites to yours
You’ve probably heard that Google likes to see links from other sites to yours. This is very true as Google sees links as a bit like votes for a site. Get as many links as you can from other sites to yours. Even better if you can get lots of those links from sites somewhat related to yours, maybe the boot manufacturer? The shoe association? Furryfootwear.com.au if there is one!
Better still, if some of those links have words like “pink ugg boots” and “australian ugg boots” etc as their anchor text (Anchor text is the highlighted text you click on in a link, usually blue and underlined).
There you have it – the bare bones basics of SEO, its not going to make a professional SEO out of you but its enough to get you listed for quite specific search terms. Good Luck with it…
Posted under Internet Marketing
This post was written by admin on August 18, 2009
Some really nice info here. I work with lots of small businesses and entrepreneurs who are all wanting to be a bigger part of the search engine marketing crowd. They also want to have a bigger presence for their web sites and blogs. This information will be great at showing them more ways to be successful.
John Sternal
i am new to this Work-At-Home style of earning money. what i do is monetize my blog and websites using Google Adsense.