Great SEO for Small businesses: It’s Possible

Long gone are the days of yore when search engine optimization was free and magical. Back in the day, a canny Internet marketer only needed to repeat a keyword a certain number of times and poof, search engine domination is achieved!

In the late 90′s, Pamela Anderson was crowned “the most downloaded woman on the Internet”. A few crafty SEOs saw this as an opportunity and started stuffing sites unrelated to Pam with keyword permutations of her name. The result? SPAMela Anderson.

Yahoo and other “ancient” search engines started showing top results for Pam Anderson that were totally irrelevant. Users found themselves looking at anything from car parts to Viagra when clicking on search engine suggested links. It would take several years before Google started a revolution with the introduction of relevance-based search algorithms.

These days, it’s becoming increasingly tough to rank for your keywords if you don’t know what you’re doing. SEO has become a multi-million dollar industry and the rates that SEO firms can charge for non-guaranteed services can sing to the tune of the tens of thousands.

So what’s a small business with a new website to do? Relax. There’s an alternative to being gobbled up by the bigger fish.

The key here is to take your baby steps, facilitate sustainable growth and DO THE SWALLOWING when you get big enough.

Sound like a plan? I’ll show you today how to do great SEO for your small business site without bleeding financially. Here are a few tips:

Start where you are – I’ve alluded to this for some time now but it really does work. Google is pushing for localization and small businesses who want to get started with their own counties or states are the most likely to benefit. Using more specific, long tailed keywords will yield a smaller volume but more targeted flow of traffic.

That’s a pretty good thing to have. Traffic from long tailed keywords (search terms three words or longer) have proven to be more likely to result in conversions than more general keywords. By attaching the name of your city or state to keywords in your meta titles, PPC ads and content, you’ll be more likely to be found by potential customers from your own area.

Example: If you’re targeting the keyword “dry cleaning services” and your shop is in the Chicago area, you might want to go with “Dry cleaning services Chicago”. It doesn’t stop you from being competitive globally, but it does put you in a position of strength against local competitors.

Easy, quality backlinks – Most cities and states have websites and registries run by the local or state governments where you can get listed. These are often free listings and require only that you fill out a form online and show some proof that your business exists and is legitimate. Links coming from .gov sites are usually around 500% more potent than an average backlink. This should get you in Google’s good graces pretty fast.

Similarly, you can become a member of your town’s local business associations. These organizations often have websites where you can ask for a listing. Because these are non-profit organizations, it’s likely that their site has the .org extension, which is more potent than the average dotcom domain.

Being active and helpful in the local education scene is always good. If you’ve done some kind of favor or provided resources or sponsorships to the local school, you may want to get a link from pages in the school site relevant to your business. Even if there’s no existing page that talks explicitly about a topic related to your niche, you can always ask a teacher or a student to post a little something about you in the school site’s forum with an accompanying link. This will score you a nice .edu link that’s similar in value to a .gov one.

Getting listed in some business directories will provide additional traction. Yahoo’s directory, for instance, is a paid directory service but it sometimes gives freebies to some local sites. Try your luck and find other directories that might be doing the same.

Here’s a resource for free web directories: http://www.directorycritic.com/free-directory-list.html

That’s a LOT of web directories, so just choose the ones with the highest Page Rank and let some submissions fly.

Additionally, you can publish a few articles in article directories like Ezine, GoArticles, ArticleGarden and so forth. Sure, the link juice won’t be anything to write mom about but these sites do provide you a couple of backlinks to your internal pages. This adds some variety and relevance to your link profile. At the very least, EVERY LITTLE BIT HELPS, so go and get some links from these guys.

Make sure you’re clean – I’ve hinted about it before and I’ll talk about it in more detail now: INSTALL GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS. This Google gift from search engine heaven helps you see exactly how Google sees your site.

Always be aware of the diagnostics section where Webmaster Tools tells you which pages are down, which pages are being duplicated internally and if your sitemap is working properly.

This helps you resolve internal issues that can be triggering Google filters or pulling down your site’s quality score. Once you identify the issues, your web administrator should be able to draw up a solution for you.

Provide expert content -  You did think of becoming very knowledgeable about your niche before starting your business, right? Good. It shouldn’t be tough for you or someone in your team to write a few articles for your site. A simple FAQ sheet should do great initially and then just keep dropping useful information whenever you can.

Better yet, put up a blog and post away when you have promos, thoughts or even opinions on the latest developments in your industry. This breeds both credibility and a personal touch that your target market is sure to appreciate.

Oh yeah, and good content is often linked to by relevant websites. Duh.

Have a healthy dose of prose – A beautiful site is practically useless if nobody can find and appreciate it. If you’re planning to fill your site up with Flash, images and videos, keep in mind that Google can’t “read” these things the way it can read text.

Text is the basis of all searches at this point. People enter words, not images to search for things they want to find. Therefore, Google needs to find text in your website that matches the searcher’s queries for you to be ranked high. It doesn’t matter how nicely alt-tagged your images are. If you don’t have much text in your site, your rankings are sure to suffer.

The idea here is to have a healthy balance of good text copy and design. Make sure that the text that’s close to your images, Flash and videos are relevant to what these media are showing to the user. Make appropriate use of bolds, header tags, anchor links and captions. Place emphasis on keywords and make sure that the word count is substantial. Do this and you’ll avoid the Google gallows.

Keep things light – Site loading speed is a significant factor in how Google computes your quality score. Sites that load fast provide a better user experience, giving them an edge on the competition in Google rankings.

Apparently, Google has bought in to the “light” movement. Bud Light, Spam Lite, Marlboro Lights – Good stuff.

Speeding up your site isn’t rocket science. Just make sure you have a combination of text and other media in place. Images should be in light formats such as JPEG, PNG, or WebP unless special situations call for heavier, more detailed image formats.

Flash should be used sparingly, while videos can be uploaded to YouTube or other hosting sites and just embedded to your pages. Ask your web developers to make sure that your site’s HTML is clean. These are small things that can add up into big wins when approached with due diligence.

These tips should keep you busy and get you started on your quest to becoming a key figure in your niche. As always, hard work, creativity and originality will pay dividends for your business. Let me know in the comments section below how these strategies worked for you.

Until then,

Andy “Easy SEO” Jenkins

P.S. I’ll be writing about more advanced SEO techniques in the coming days to try and guide you to the next level. Watch out – we’ll have a lot of learning to do.

Tagged as: Andy Jenkins, easy seo, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, seo techniques small business seo, small business