April 17, 2007 16:55
Category: Optimizing
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Small business SEO is an art by itself for fighting against odds. Not many website owners can afford costly ads to promote their product or service. PPC ads are sure an answer, but there one needs lot of patience and practice to hone the skill of maximizing return.
Though there is a strong argument that sooner than later it'll be imperative to step into the world of PPC ads if only to survive, yet for many the initial steps are still limited within the confines of organic SEO.
While placing keywords in strategic places in a webpage and following up with targeted relevant content form the basis of page optimization, small business SEO can extend beyond with some clever and thoughtful actions.
So, what are some important steps for low-cost (or no-cost) small business SEO? Here are a few suggestions:
Studying Log Files
Log files reveal a lot than what is usually thought by small website owners. 2 very useful information that nearly any log tells are (1) search terms used by visitors to arrive at different pages, and (2) time spent at each visited webpage.
If a particular search term is used frequently to arrive at a webpage than what the page is optimized for, then that term can be immediately used to write a separate webpage.
For example, in this website, the term 'how to write a summary' brings more visitors than the term 'how to write summary' that the page has been optimized for. 'Writing a summary' too fetches significant visitors.
This means if I write 2 pages that are optimized for the 2 terms above, I'll open up more opportunity to lure visitors to my site. So, studying log files can indeed throw up excellent clues for small business SEO at virtually no cost.
Internal Linking
Network of links is what the Internet is all about. Often, our focus firmly stays on obtaining incoming links from other websites, even opting for reciprocal linking with 'like-minded' websites. Nothing wrong there per se, only that internal linking must not be lost sight of as a very useful small business SEO technique at no cost.
If you watch this page closely, you'll find several links that point to other pages of this website using the names of the pages as anchor texts. These 2 together (internal linking plus using anchor texts) increases the 'weight' of the pages in the eyes of search engines, and therefore stands good chance of top ranking.
Sitemap For Google
Sitemap serves human visitors as well as search engine robots. Though human visitors are less likely to spend time sifting through sitemap, for robots it's a fodder they like. Google offers excellent webmaster tools, among which is creation of sitemap to make it easy for the search giant to easily crawl your website pages.
Needless to say, the more and frequent your pages are crawled (especially true for blogs), the more the chance is for them to be indexed faster. Click here for Google's webmaster tools.
Writing Articles
If you're in article writing, you're surely submitting them to article directories for publishing. If yes, what is it that you're mentioning in resource box? Among other strong points about yourself, take care to include a link that points to your website's sitemap.
The reason is as search engine robots crawl your articles in an article directory, which is quite frequent, they'll follow the link to your sitemap, giving them one more occasion to crawl deeply into your site.
Of course, more than the resource box, it's your quality content that matters. If you can write informative articles that help others, you're in fact one up in your quest for low-cost small business SEO.
If writing is not your strong point, consider studying the free e-book, Make Your Site Sell. You may also look at how to build on writing strategy.
Selecting Keywords
When you study your log file, there is a good chance you'll come across search terms used by visitors that are somewhat querying in nature. Examples: how to start website, making money with AdSense, good content writer, and so on.
This shows web visitors are less likely to use generic search terms like web marketing, search engine optimization, and suchlike for getting relevant information. The good news is that 'querying' search terms are also those that convert into some positive action in your favor.
Therefore, instead of choosing generic search terms for small business SEO, it makes sense to identify such keyword phrases that have underlying intention of taking decisive action on part of web visitors.
How can you find those key-phrases? Apart from log files, you can use free keyword tools for the purpose. Read my article on some free keyword research tools to find which one meets your need.
RSS Retains Visitors
Do you blog? If yes, you may be aware of powerful ways to let the world know about your blog. RSS is one such.
Usually, the moment you publish a new post, the RSS file gets updated simultaneously. What is needed then is to ping blog publishers and RSS readers to tell them about your new post.
But if you are not blogging yet, it's time you start one. Blogs are an excellent means for small business SEO. As the sub-title suggests, indeed RSS retains visitors.
Conclusion
There are many other techniques at low cost or no cost that can qualify as small business SEO. Expanding on website content is my favorite, and I keep going at it fairly regularly.
If you're a recent entrant in this game, refer Wikipedia for a good grasp on small business SEO and how it looks at search engine optimization done at its expense. If you have other suggestions, do write to us.
Related reading:
- Search Engine Optimization - Basic Steps
- Keyword Selection - Why It Is Required?
- Offpage Optimization - The 80/20 Rule
