We all know the expression, “An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure.” What this means to your standard small to medium business is that having your web designers and developers use SEO principles when designing your site in the first place can often get you the search engine rankings your business needs to survive without having to resort to the “pound of cure” of expensive SEO Companies.
Below, find 16 SEO tips—one for every ounce in a pound.
1) Identify your niche. What makes you different from the other companies doing similar things to you? For instance, if you are a landscaping company, do you engage in design/build projects and excel at water installations? If so, focus on this! It’s the root of your future success. There will be something that differentiates you from the others. Find it, know it, and embrace it. You can be the 40th copy center in town, but if you say you’re the one closest to downtown, there’s your competitive edge.
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2) Analyze the competition. The chances are high that you have competitors, and those competitors are doing the web thing right. Even if they are *not* doing the web thing right, take a good long look at their sites. Figure out what their strategy is. Try to see what they are doing right. Analyze what they are doing wrong. Then, know if you or your design and marketing team can develop ideas to improve it.
3) Make juicy content. Provide content that is engaging and worth reading. If your site’s written content – the copy – is interesting, the visitor will spend time reading it. They will remember your site and quite possibly even return. If you are a small to medium business with no one on staff who can write well, it is important to find someone who can. Ask friends and colleagues if they know a copywriter. Check your network. If you need to, hire out for that content: having good content is essential to your SEO strategy.
4) Make the site feel user-friendly. People coming to your site will make up their minds like that (snapping fingers sound) about whether your site is worth the time to look at. If your site is cluttered, confusing, difficult to navigate, or (ahem) ugly, it will do a wonderful job alienating potential site visitors.
Make your site nicely designed, usable, and well organized. If you don’t have your designers, find a local web design firm to do the job. You will want to use a company that knows SEO. Try a search string like “web design location” with your town or city’s name in the location string. Look through the results on the first page and see if there is a firm that looks: a) within budget b) professional c) savvy with SEO site-building (they will already know many of the steps listed in this article).
A hint: don’t take them at their word. Ask them for examples of sites they have worked on to support their claims of being good at designing sites with SEO in mind. If they say, for instance, that they are responsible for #1 results for search strings like “pool restoration Calgary” or “well diggers Adelaide”, it substantiates those claims. See if the #1 site has a “designed by ____” tag at the bottom. The proof will be in the pudding.
5) Identify your key search strings. How are people going to be using Bing or Google to find you? What are people going to write in that search bar? It will sometimes not be what you suspect it’s going to be.
Tie this in with point #1 above: think of your niche specialization when identifying your key search phrases. That can be what gives you a competitive edge with your SEO strategy.
Google provides some valuable help. Look at Google Insights. There is a lot of help here to understand how saturated your key search string may be and what alternatives you can target. For instance, if you are focusing on “cabin rental Ontario,” the Insights result shows you similar terms and”Rising Searches,” which shows dramatically shifting trends in related search strings.
6) Alt tags. Use em. Alt tags help search engines know what the context of links is about. And check your temptation at the door to over-spice your page with key phrases. If the linked-to page does not have any text that agrees with the alt-tag contents, then search engines may, at best, shrug off the alt-tag contents or, at worst, give you SEO demerit points.
7) Have your link text be descriptive (preferably with key phrases). “Click here” does not do anything to elevate the importance of what you’re linking to. Make it mean something.
Add descriptive text that uses your key phrase; if possible, remember thehe message of #6 above – if the link-toa page does not have any text that appears to agree with the link text, then the algorithms could decrease the value of that link.
8) Use text-based links when possible for your site navigation. And let’s one up that. Use text-based navigation links; as mentioned in #7 above, let those navigation items have your desired key phrase when possible. If you sell rocket ships, having a link that says “buy rocket ships” gets right to the point, and the search engines eat that up like baseball fans eating hot dogs at a game.
9) Title Tags – SEO paprika. Sometimes (like using image-based navigation), title tags can be invasive and annoying when the popup text obscures whatever you are trying to read. Other times, they provide information people like to read or know – the informative tidbit that appears when your mouse hovers over an interesting image. In either case, they can help build up your SEO cred. Title tags in site construction can still be underutilized. Use them well, and they can be an effective SEO tool.
10) Google Analytics. Google has given us tools that can greatly impact our SEO success. Install the code available with Google Analytics, and soon, you’ll have a greater insight into your site traffic and how to hone your future key phrases or AdWords campaign.
11) Page titles – Don’t just have your company name as the title of each page! Why put Booya Rocket Ship Company when your page title can explicitly have a key phrase right there, all juicy and waiting for the search engine indexing? Make the titles unique and make them count.
12) Meta – still valid. Meta’s not as important as it used to be. Once upon a time, in the historical wild west of the Internet, a person could flood their metal with heaps of words that had nothing to do with their site, and it could trick the unrefined search engines of the day into giving up the goods. No more. But these meta tags and descriptions still have a place at the table. Like the page title above, use meta tags and descriptions uniquely on your page. And like 6 & 7 above, if the meta tags agree with your content, you’ll get some SEO cred out of the deal.
13) Flash is pretty—and empty. Search engines masticate text and will only swallow it and immediately throw up pretty, shiny Flash stuff. There is nothing in Flash that search engines are (yet) technologically able to read, let alone digest.
If your sales or management team insists lash is the answer, tou are responsible for doing whatever you can to get them fired. Kay, maybe you are not fired, but research engine optimization is difficult enough without having your team develop a quixotic obsession with pretty things that lead to SEO failure.
14) Updates. The static site will slowly sink in rankings. Does your business model support the idea of a blog? If so, put one in. If not, is there room for a News section? Maybe new additions to a Gallery? However, you need to do it; get some updates in there! This works on several levels. The human visiting the site will see that it is not ignored and perhaps get further engaged with your site. The search engine crawler also sees that your site isn’t static and will visit more often, increasing the chances of your site keeping up a decent ranking. No matter how you paint it, you end up with SEO success.
ARemember#3 above if you’re providing content, make the content good. Juicy content will interest the user. And juicy content with light sprinklings of key phrases can only help substantiate the story you are trying to build.
SEO is not something you do once and then walk away from. It is a constant game of strategy, and the rules change frequently. Remember that the time involved is an investment in your success, so it is worth it.
15) Social Media. Many have shuddered at Twitter or Facebook and wished they would go away, but this ignores the sheer power of our social relationships and their impact on our success. Social media can have a huge impact on your site’s SEO success. Read articles like Mike Dobb’s informative Top Ten Twitter SEO Tips.
Look to see if your competitors have Facebook pages. If so, what are they doing with them? How can you improve upon it? How can you engage people? Remember the human element behind it all. Don’t spam. Forge relationships whenever possible. People are at the root of your success or failure.
16) Don’t forget the community. They are an essential part of your SEO strategy. If you have that blog in place, consider allowing comments if you sell items and consider adding customer ratings. And if you have articles with links to the greater social media out there.
