Is your company Web site working hard? Or is it hardly working? Search engine optimization promises to make your site popular without costing you an arm and a leg. But you need to understand a few things to make it work for you.
Lots of small and midsize businesses have Web sites, but most of them get hardly any traffic.
Sound familiar?
Believe it or not, there are plenty of things you can do about it without spending a boatload of money or becoming a full-time Web marketing expert.
Pretty much everyone agrees that search engine optimization can be the cheapest, most cost-effective way to drive traffic to your Web site. But for most of us, SEO can seem complicated, confusing, vague, intimidating, and a hellacious time sink.
And hiring an SEO consultant can feel expenisve and risky. What if you end up with one of those spam-fueled snake-oil salesmen promising to instantly put your site on the first Google of search rankings?
Either way, you really need to have a good basic understanding of what's going on to make your site as popular as it can be.
To help, I want to pass along some good good basic advice from the experts to regular folks, and share links to some good places to go a little deeper without having to live and breathe the subject.
To start off with, check out Marketing Pilgrim's 7-Minute SEO Guide.
Here's the 30-second version:
1. Search-engine friendly site structure. Tell Google that it's OK to crawl your site, avoid using too much Flash, Javascript, or image-based content or navigation, and put as much of your site in HTML as possible. Oh, and get your own IP address.
2. Search-engine friendly pages. Use words that your audience might be searching for, with different ones on different pages, especially in the title tags, page names, and H1 headings. Oh, and make sure each page has at least 250 words of text for the search engines to index.
3. Search-engine friendly linking strategies. Make it easy for other sites (including business partners, suppliers, clients, industry blogs, etc.) to link to you. Oh, and try to get them to link using the keywords you want to rank high in.
That's only the beginning of course. From the good folks at Search Engine Land, comes a slightly more intensive, big-picture primer in the form of Do-It-Yourself SEO Advice For SMBs :
- Take a few hours to learn the basics of search marketing
- Learn what your customers are searching for
- Create a Web presence
- Submit your business to the local search engines
- Track and analyze your results
- Get social
- Stay informed about best practices in small business and local SEO
According to author David Mihm, SMBs can actually do all this for $30 - $200 per year. Of course, that doesn't count the value of your time, but if your business has more time than money right now, it's time you get started.
And here are some good places to look for more basic advice, much of it designed especially for small businesses:
SEOMoz: Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization
SEOMoz: The Beginner's Checklist for Learning SEO
SEOmoz: The Beginner's Checklist for Small Business SEO
Outspoken Media: Small Business SEO: How To Launch That Web site
Small Business Trends: If I Were Launching a New Small Biz Web Site Today
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