SEO for Your Business

Introduction

Having your own website as a Business is a must in our modern digital world. But, unfortunately having a website does not mean your business will be found by your clients the minute you are online. Far from that. With more than 20 billion webpages on the Internet, how can your business have been found without spending tons of money on advertising?

The answer lies in using search engine optimization (SEO). SEO can be defined as the process of driving traffic to your website organically (unpaid) from the search engines. To get the search engine bots to notice your site and include it in the results pages, you’ll need to work on these three components:

1. Making sure your content is relevant to the keyword phrases being searched
2. Optimizing your website with keywords and linking structures
3. Building powerful inbound links to your website from others in your niche

If your Business wants to get massive exposure on the Internet, you must rank on the first page of Google for several different keyword phrases, because 90% of the internet users do not browse beyond the first page of results. Unfortunately, SEO takes a lot of time and effort. There are no instant results. If you want to have instant results you should concentrate on other, paid traffic methods.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines send automated “bots” to “crawl” the web through hyperlinks.  As I will discuss later, without external hyperlinks to your website, the bots really have no way of finding your website. It’s still possible that they’ll discover your site eventually, but without effort on your part, it may be unlikely.  Once the bots crawl your website, it becomes indexed in a huge database along with all the other indexed pages on the internet. There are literally billions of pages stored in this database. When searches are made, the engine quickly scans through relevant documents and provides results based on the most accurate possible matches. Generally, a match is determined by the presence of that keyword on the webpage. Thus, on-page optimization is extremely important.

Google and the other search engines will provide differing results depending on whether you type the phrase as-is (e.g. black computers), in quotes (“black computers “), with the + symbol (black + computers), or other variations. After the Search Engines have found matches for the search query, a special algorithm scans each of the results to determine relevance to the keyword phrase. Results are provided to the user in order from most relevant to least relevant.

How to rank well

The main two factors for your website to rank well are:

1. Your page must be relevant to the search term (listing the keyword several times throughout the course of the website, on-site optimization)
2. You need external hyperlinks (backlinks) pointing to your website to act as a “gateway” for the bots to access your site.

Eliminate stumbling blocks.

Sometimes the search engines are prevented from crawling your website for one of the below reasons which should be eliminated.

1. Your site requires cookies for navigation.
2. Framed websites.
3. Long, complicated URLs such as

http://www.website.com/page.php?ID=HuUj=987sj=%site%

4. Login pages
5. Redirect pages
6. Poor linking structure on your website. Each page on your domain should be linked to from the home page (or a sitemap). Ideally, you would like to have a very convenient linking structure, in which each page on your domain is accessible from every other page
7. Accidentally the “I would like to block search engines” option selected in the “Privacy” tab in your WordPress dashboard.
8. There is a robots.txt file preventing the search engines from crawling certain pages.
9. The page is heavily coded with JavaScript or contains Flash as its primary method of delivering content.

Keyword Phrases

If you want your website to rank in the search engines, you’ll need to optimize it for keyword phrases. Keyword research is the process of finding out which keywords will be the easiest and most beneficial to optimize for.

You have to take into consideration:

1. Search volume: How many people search for the keyword in each month.
2. Competition: How many competing websites are also optimized for this keyword phrase.

It is very important to conduct proper keyword research, to find keyword phrases that have a decent search volume but little competition. Those are the keywords that need to be targeted.

The best free keyword tool for this is The Google AdWords Keyword Tool and the Google search engine. The more targeted the keywords are, the better.

To double check how much competition your desired keyword phrase(s) have, type the keyword in quotes into the google search box, e.g. “SharePoint Vendors”

Google search for “Sharepoint Vendors” is coming back with the result of only 542 websites which are optimized for this keyword phrase which is very good. This is an excellent keyword. Any keyword phrase under 50,000 is considered pretty good, but the lower the better. Anything higher is very hard to compete with. Keyword research by itself is another topic. The above is just a basic description of the latter, so we have a sample about how to procced with on-site optimization.

On-Site Optimization

The Title

A good title might be: “Discount Computer Store – Discount Computer Laptops, Discount Desktop Computers”. Here you would have your “main” keyword phrase first, followed by a couple of secondary keyword phrases.

The titles for each of your pages should be unique and relevant to the content being displayed. Avoid extremely long titles, as Google will cut them off. Avoid “keyword stuffing” as well – jamming as many keywords as possible into the title. Google may categorize your site as spam.

The Body Text

The keywords need to appear in the body of your website several times. This is often referred to as “keyword density”. A good keyword density to aim for is 2-3%. Less than that may not be enough, more than that may be treading on spammy ground.

Include your keyword at least 3-4 times throughout the actual content – once in the first sentence if possible, a couple times throughout the paragraphs, and once in the last sentence. Emphasizing the keyword through bolding or italicizing may be a good idea. Include your keyword in the H1 tags as well, and at least once in the anchor text of a link.

Images

Add your keyword to the Title attribute of your images.

Domain

If possible use your primary keyword in your domain name. If the desired domain name is not available consider using a suffix, e.g. instead of www.computers.com where computers is the main keyword try to add a meaningful suffix like www.computersinlondon.com. Or you could use a prefix like “my” or “the”, e.g. www.mycomputers.com

Meta Tags

Meta Tags are not that important anymore for keywords. But Using the meta description tag you can write a good description of your website, preferably including your main keyword phrase in this description. This description then will appear in the search engine results pages.

Sitemaps

A sitemap with all pages should be added to your website, either in HTML or in XML format.

WordPress Optimization

If you are using WordPress as your website the following steps should be taken to make your site search engine friendly:

Permalinks

The default WordPress sitting makes ugly URLs, like this: http://www.myblog.com/?p=132

Change this setting under Permalinks to “Custom Structure” %postname% which will change your url to: http://www.myblog.com/post-name/

Title

The default setting for WordPress is to create titles like this:

My Blog >> Archive >> My Blog Title

A better option is to change the structure, so it looks more like this:

My Blog Title >> My Blog

The above requires editing the header PHP file. This is done that way:

Go to Appearance >> Editor and select header.php

Replace the code in the title tags <title></title> with this one:

<title><?php wp_title(); ?></title> or, if  you want to include the blog name in the title change the code to:

<title><?php wp_title(); ?> – <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>

 

Pinglist

WordPress automatically “pings” a service called “pingomatic.com” every time a new post is published. Use this feature by adding more services like pingomatic into the “Update Services” box by going into Settings >> Writing in the admin section of WordPress.

A list of more ping services can be found by doing a simple google search.

 

Plugins for SEO purposes

 

Don’t use too many plugins as this will make your site slower. Only use what is needed. For SEO purposes I would recommend the following plugins:

• SEO All In One
• Google XML Sitemap
• Related Posts
• Robots Meta
• WP-Cache

 

 

 

Off-Site Optimization

Once your website is fully optimized you should focus your attention on off-site optimization.  What is off-site optimization? It means you need to get high quality backlinks to your own website from other websites, preferably high-ranking websites. The more backlinks you have, the more weight Google will give your website in the search results. Always try to include the keyword you want to rank for as the anchor text.

 

How to gain backlinks

 

Forum signatures

 

Posting on forums with a link back to your website in the signature is a good way to build a steady stream of backlinks to your site. Each thread that you post in will provide a fresh backlink.

 

Blog Commenting

Another way to gain valuable backlinks is to comment on relevant blogs in your niche. Generally, blog comments allow you to include an URL. Whatever you put in the “Name” box will be the anchor text. In some cases, you may be able to get away with using a keyword as the anchor text, but most likely it will be considered spamming and your comment will be deleted.

 

Article Marketing

Article marketing is yet another great way to build backlinks while simultaneously driving lots of traffic to your site. Submit lots of high-quality articles with links pointing back to your website and you’ll gradually see your search engine rankings improve along with increased overall traffic to your website.