7 Small Business SEO Tips

Every year SEO gets more complicated as Google rolls out updates and changes the rules. This is especially frustrating for small business owners who don't have the time or resources to stay current in, what they believe to be, an esoteric and confusing industry.
Here are seven small business SEO tips to help earn more business through traditional organic search rankings.

1. Onsite SEO is Necessary But Not Sufficient

Yes, optimizing title tags, site structure (keep it flat) and load-speed are important. Many experiments have shown these elements are in the Google algorithm.
Don’t obsess. Hire someone to run an assessment and tune up the site; then move-on. Far too many small businesses get stuck at the starting line.

2. Website Content & Experience Are Critical

We have all read that “content is king,” but what does that really mean?
Your website must have engaging content for the end-user. The importance of this can’t be overstated. It will impact time-on-site, conversion and SEO (engaging content is more likely to be shared and linked to).
It is also critical because it orients the small business webmaster towards offering something of value. Thin content leaves a bad footprint, both onsite and offsite.

3. Use Content Marketing to Earn Backlinks

Most small business owners are savvy enough to know that 70 percent of their search engine rankings are the result of backlinks. Being a pragmatic bunch, they then ask “where can I buy some?”
Don’t buy backlinks - it also leaves a bad footprint.
Small business marketers need to earn links, and content marketing is extremely effective for gaining earned links. The trick is in the trade. Something of value must be offered.
Quality content containing humor, information, controversy, politics or training usually brings backlinks - and is definitely considered acceptable SEO.

4. Know Your Backlink Profile

There has been healthy debate recently about the changing role of anchor text in the Google algorithm. Even if the importance is fading, it is clearly still a factor.
Small businesses should know their backlink profiles. A lack of branded anchors and brand mentions is a clear signal of manipulation, and therefore a rank killer.
Healthy businesses market their brands through press releases and are discussed in forums by name. This all leaves a good footprint.
Co-citation is also a sign of a natural backlink profile. Strong companies are mentioned in the same paragraph as other strong brands.
Articles with a single anchored link to a website with low domain authority sticks out like a sore thumb. Google can spot these insubstantial articles and weighs the links accordingly, or worse. Read about the Penguin update for more.

5. Create Buzz Through Community Building

While the term link bait is perhaps overused, it is considered an acceptable activity by Google. This is because the activity is aimed toward creating a positive end-user experience.
Without a community element, link baiting is hard to distinguish from content marketing. Developing a community (best if done onsite) is perhaps the best link bait of all because the community starts to develop the content in ways no SEO consultant could ever think of.
This is truly organic, extremely natural, and helps SEO. Read up on Latent Semantic Indexing if this concept is confusing.

6. Quality Over Quantity

It is tempting to fall for the email solicitations for large quantities of inexpensive links. But we all know where that got JCPenney.
The SEO industry isn't like the automobile industry, where automation is praised as a gain in efficiency. Automation in SEO is bad because Google says it is. They believe it results in a poorer end-user experience, an argument that has merit.
Small businesses may not like this rule, but they do need to respect it if they want to see increases in rankings.

7. Review the SEO Reports

Small business owners are busy, but that is no excuse for not knowing what the SEO consultant is doing. It's important to digest the monthly reports for a couple of reasons:

• The results should be moving in the right direction. Don’t expect miracles, just monthly progress.
• The monthly reports should demonstrate that the SEO team is executing with a disciplined process. Small business should not foot the bill for experiments. There is enough risk facing small business owners already.

Conclusions

Google is a computer, largely, and needs to be thought of as such. The major elements in the algorithm are fairly well understood.
While it's true that updates are frequent and the rules of the game do shift, the major elements of onsite SEO and backlinks have been the fuel for better rankings for years. Follow these seven small business SEO tips to earn better rankings and build a community around your brand. And ignore the rest as noise.

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10 Simple SEO Tips

Search Engine Optimization is a bugaboo, full of misinformation put out to prey on the fear and anxiety business owners have about wanting to rank high in a particular niche.  If you could do just one thing that would help a lot would you do it?  Yes you would of course. So I am going to give you 10 pieces of advice to take the edge off and will make a difference in your site’s visibility.

1. Have a WordPress website. Even a simple one can be a search engine magnet and they are also good because it is easier to do the following steps than if you have a static html site.
2. Regularly add high quality content to your website so that people visit and link to your site. Write blog posts and articles that your readers are interested in and you will begin to build traffic. Traffic is good and links to your content are good for SEO.
3. If you have a poorly designed website and are not creating fresh content by blogging, you probably will not rank well in searches. Do not be lured in by shysters selling SEO services to people who don’t know it is not okay to stuff your writing with keywords or buy and sell links. A reputable SEO person is going to be all about the content and know that a site must be good enough to convert the visitors into taking action once they are there.
4. Install the WP SEOplugin by Yoast and learn to use it to make the titles and descriptions of your website pages and posts more search engine friendly so that your titles and first 160 characters of your posts can be more reader friendly and your posts and page content does not have to sound spammy to your readers. Don’t just copy your title and first part of your post into the plugin. That defeats the purpose.
5. Use one main keyword or keyword phrase per post and make sure that word or phrase is in your text, titles and excerpts. Google can slap you down for having too many keywords and for using all the same keywords on each page and post.
6. Make sure your site’s performing well. You will get dinged for sites that load slow. Optimize your photos and watch the number and types of plugins that you use. They can slow you site down.
7. Be smart about choosing your keywords for your site. You will never come up for extremely competitive terms like, for example, “Shoes” (1,800,000,000 search results). But you could work on coming up for “Handmade Tango Shoes Buenos Aires” ( 23,200 search results). These are called long-tail terms and are much easier to rank for.
8. Verify authorship on your website: Get a Google+ account for yourself with photo and full profile. Add Links to your website and then add links back to your Google + from your website. You may then have your image show up in a Google search.
9.  When you add new content,  post a link to it on Twitter and Google + and it will be indexed by the search engines much faster. Use the WPSEO Plugin to create an xml site map for your WordPress website. This plugin works in the background of your site, giving search engines a map to index your site by. It refreshes itself with the addition of new content and automatically sends the map to Google Yahoo and Bing.
10. Claim your business on Yelp and on Google places which has recently changed to Google + Business Pages. You will come to the top of a search page because of that especially if you get a lot of reviews.

Remember the best thing you can do is to build your site and reputation by creating content your readers, customers, clients need and want.  Every page and post can come up as a separate item in a search and they will continue to come up in searches for years which gives you geometric growth in traffic. A steady input of good product, good customer service and fresh content on your website, will insure that your traffic and your business will grow organically.
If down the road, you are doing all of the things above and want to tweak your search performance, by all means hire a reputable SEO firm to help you. But remember,  as much as we wish it were true, there is no cream to make our thighs smaller and there is not an SEO magic pill solution that will make you rank number one in a Google search, without the work.

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Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks

It’s not easy to say what the top 10 best SEO tips really are, especially with all the so-called “experts” claiming to know the latest SEO tricks and “secrets Google doesn’t want you to know about.” It would take you days, even weeks to sort through this mess. So we thought we’d make it easy for beginners at SEO and condense all the clutter into what we call our Top 10 SEO tips and tricks.

Keep in mind, though, that we did not list these in any particular order. #1 will be just as important as #10 and so on. Our goal is not to say which tips are more or less valuable, but rather, to give beginners a starting point in their SEO efforts. These are all important and they apply to any industry or organization.

10. Free SEO is Still SEO

There’s a misconception out there that SEO has to cost an arm and a leg. And while it’s true that the very best SEO services will cost you (mainly because it costs the SEO company to provide it!), there are plenty of free SEO optimization techniques you can apply to your blog or corporate website. You can:

Shore up your on-page SEO
Analyze your competition with free SEO tools
Research keywords with the Google Keyword Tool
Contact other bloggers for guest blogging opportunities
Write an epic, pillar article for your blog that will attract links and visitors for years

9. Start With Local SEO

It can be tempting to shoot for the stars and set your goals on keywords like “Accountant” or “Auto Insurance.” But before you go after these blockbuster keywords, it makes a lot more sense to target easier local SEO keywords like “Houston Accountant” or “Miami Auto Insurance,” depending on where your business is located.

8. Google SEO is a Slow Process

This is one of the more simple SEO tips to understand, although one of the most frustrating. No matter how well you take heed of Google SEO tips and tricks, the process is going to be slow. No one is able to rank a site #1 overnight unless the keyword is completely useless. No one. And this makes sense for Google, too, as it prevents the SERPs from fluctuating too much. You have to prove yourself for more than just a week for Google to reward you with a top 10 ranking. And if we’re talking about the top keywords, it very well might take you or your SEO company an entire year. This goes for Google as well as Yahoo and Bing, and for any CMS–Wordpress, Joomla, whatever. No one is exempt from this trust-building phase.

7. SEO Copywriting is Everything

Link-building gets all the attention, but just remember that the only reliable information Google has about your site is the content you write on it. Think of your blog posts as little spider webs, each of them serving to “catch” another segment in your target audience. Let’s say your site is about cars. There are sports car fans, luxury car fans, convertible fans, monster truck fans, etc. It would be impossible to attract all of these different types of fans with a site just about “cars”–that’s too generic. But writing a blog post about sports cars, another post about monster trucks, etc, will help you capture all of these different types of fans.

6. SEO is Always Tough for Beginners

It can be a rough first few weeks and months for beginners who want to learn SEO. There’s a lot of new terminology to memorize (what the heck is Joomla?), lots of outdated information (do meta keywords still matter?), and the competition is getting fiercer by the day. But here’s the good news: every SEO expert today was a beginner at some point in the past, and they reached guru status by a constant focus on improving their SEO game. No one is born with SEO knowledge; it doesn’t “come naturally” to anyone since SEO itself was invented years after each of us was born.

5. SEO Comes Before Web Design

Web design is inherently sexy. SEO…not so much.

And although we’re the first to admit that web design is extremely important, it’s a good idea to take care of your SEO before you work on your web design, or at least, your web designer should have a professional SEO at his side to consult him.

This simple SEO tip will save you hours of headaches later down the line, as it’s an absolute pain to go back and have to change your core web design to make it search-engine friendly. Much better to fix this at the start.

4. Bing SEO = Google SEO

A common mistake SEO bloggers make is they think they have to optimize their website for Google and Bing separately, somehow thinking that these two search engines have drastically different ranking algorithms. The truth is that yes, their algorithms are different, but it’s no use trying to use two separate strategies to rank your sites on both. What works for one will probably work for the other, and most of their algorithm differences are things you can’t control anyway (keywords in your domain name, for example).

3. Focus on Link Diversity

Recently, research out of SEOmoz confirmed what many top SEOs already knew: it’s not just how many links you receive, it’s from how many different websites. Google loves to see link diversity in your backlink profile, so give them what they want to see and try to score links from as many different sites as possible.

Here’s a snippet of the data that came out of the SEOmoz research study:



What the graphic basically means is that SERP rankings have a 0.25 correlation with SEO rankings. In normal human terms, this means that link diversity makes up about 6.25% of the entire Google algorithm. This might not seem like much, but it actually is pretty important. Google has stated that they look at more than 200 search engine ranking factors when calculating their rankings, which means that the average ranking factor accounts for 0.5% of the entire algorithm. This makes link diversity 12.5x more important than your average ranking factor.

2. Read the Top Online SEO forums

This is probably the most simple SEO tip on this top 10 list. It doesn’t take any special software or expert knowledge. All you have to do is read.

Although the top SEO experts tend to stay away from the forums (they’re too busy running their own firms!), there are still plenty of knowledgeable people who are more than happy to help you succeed in your SEO efforts. There is an absolute goldmine of free SEO tips and tricks available on SEO forums. If you’re paying attention, you’ll be able to recognize the experts from the novices. Once you do, pay extra attention to each of their posts, as they’ve been through it all and back.

1. Don’t Give Up

I know I mentioned at the start that these top 10 SEO tricks and tips are in no particular order, but I’m going to have to take that back, because this last one is of prime importance.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen beautiful websites go to waste because their owners just gave up on the SEO game. Too much work, too much time, too much money, so they say.

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