Search Optimization for Small Businesses
Search Optimization is everyone’s favorite buzz word. SEO, SEM, page rank, google bots – lots of unchartered territory for a small business who wants to build a simple website and get found on the internet. But really, SEO just means talking to the target consumer. There are lots of high tech analytics I could recommend for you, but this is a low tech article. If you want high-tech reports and stats, feel free to leave me a comment.
But, here’s a quick guide to how google works. It looks at the text on your site and matches phrases with search terms. So, if I go to a website and type in “hair salon york pa”, I get a list of all websites that have the words “hair, stylist, york, pa” (yes, google has rules on who gets first dibs, but that’s for a different post).
So, your goal, as a business owner who is responsible for things like choosing a domain name, and writing copy for your website, is to talk the right talk. What is the person typing on the other end going to type in and how can you best match that phrase. Some examples: are you an instructor or a teacher? An auto technician or a mechanic? Is a theater some place you go for movies or to watch a play? Is a dish a container for food or to watch satellite tv?
These tips won’t automatically get you to the top of google, but they’ll help you think about some of the opportunities you may be missing. Here are a quick list of things every small business website can do to be “SEO” friendly:
- Type in your name or service and see what results you get. Use this info to see if you have a good domain name (no double meanings, not a lot of other people with your name).
- Ask family, friends, customers what phrases they might search to find your business
- Make sure every paragraph of copy on the page mentions your business by name or by a business related term
- Add your company’s city and state to every page
- Have a brief description of your company in the page title – for example: Dmark Designs – a York PA web design and internet marketing company
- Sprinkle different ways to identify your product or service on each page. Example: Fluffy’s Pet Grooming Service may talk about Dog and Cat grooming, since not all people will search specifically for “Pet” grooming.
- If possible, dedicate 1 page to each product or service you provide.
- Give your web designer descriptions of any photographs for your website (Bill Smith in his blue suit)
- Find out if your web designer is writing SEO friendly alt and meta tags. These are tags that identify pages and images. Ask to view them
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