6 SEO Tips for Small Businesses
Search Engine Optimization is one of the most powerful marketing tactics for small business owners - by coming up on search engines ahead of your larger competitors, you effectively level the playing field.
Assuming that your website is a positive reflection on your business, these visitors that are actively searching for your products and services have a tendency to convert to new leads and sales at a higher rate than most other marketing channels.
Here are 6 SEO tips for small businesses that will give you a competitive advantage on Google, Yahoo and Bing:
1. Start with your visitors
Google has stated time and time again that to win at SEO, you need to produce COMPELLING content. Businesses that write content that visitors want to share and link are authoritative and credible. These are the businesses that search engines want to help you find. Good SEO starts with an understanding of what your potential customers are looking for. Here at Gainesville Marketing we use a wide variety of tools to help us understand what keywords to focus on...some paid tools and some free. Two great free tools to help you get started are Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool and Google Insights.
2. Use keyword in your headers and sub-headers
Your headers and sub headers stand out from other words on your website to search engines. It’s the way they are coded in your HTML. When you include your primary search keywords in these headers, you are essentially saying “Hey - this is exactly what this page is all about!”. Note: don’t forget that the primary purpose of these headers are to inform the reader... make sure the keywords are IN CONTEXT.
3. Use keywords in your page titles
Every page on your site has a page title... bits of text located within the html of the page and usually visible at the top of every browser. These page titles, unlike other meta data like descriptions and keywords, still carry weight in search rankings and help search engines understand what exactly your page is all about.
4. Including keywords early in your content
Placing your search keywords in your first paragraph is simply a good “writing for the web” tip but you get the added bonus that it is also SEO friendly. When people read online, they often skim information trying to determine whether your site will answer their questions or help them with a specific problem.
They are usually going to make that call within a few seconds so you want them to find keywords related to their search right away. Makes sense eh?
In addition, when you include search keywords early in your paragraphs you encourage that piece of text to be used in Google’s search snippets (see image above).
4. SEO Optimized Images
The images on your website can and should help search engines understand what your pages are all about. Images contain keyword rich information in several places:
- their file names
- their alt tags
- their image titles.
“What is an alt tag?” you might be asking. An “alt tag” helps define an image within an html page. Search engines don’t read images, only text. In addition, some people disable images in their browser and when images don’t display, alt tags are still shows which allows them to understand how the image supports your page content. Image Titles are similar to alt tags and provide additional information to tell visitors what your image is about. Titles are what you see pop up when you mouse over the image.
Note: For detailed video tutorials on optimizing your images click here
5. Don’t SPAM!
Chances are that you’ve visited a website and read something that sounds very repetitive and left you scratching your head and saying “WHY do they keep saying that, over and over again?”. Usually this is a because the author is trying to stuff keywords into the page in order to gain an SEO advantage. Don’t do this. Not only can you incur a penalty from Google but you also alienate potential customers and after all, your website’s MAIN purpose is to convert visitors to customer right?