SEO Search Engine Optimization
A picture paints a thousand words as they say in the world of art, so below you will find an SEO search engine optimization strategy graphically represented. This I believe captures the nub of what is required in order to lift a web site up to the coveted position of page one or two on the search engines results listing.
Keyword Selection
Getting on page one or two of Google or any of the other search engines is not necessarily an overnight process and can require a consistent and concentrated effort; particularly when you are targeting highly competitive keywords and or keyword phrases i.e. the words or phrases people use to search for what you are offering them.
That said, for many small businesses operating in a specific location and offering a particular service, SEO can be a relatively simple affair. Knowing where to place your keywords on your pages and in your headers, along with a good and concise description of what you do will probably be sufficient to get you a good position. No guarantees but sometimes it really is quite a simple process for someone who knows what they are doing.
For example if you have a financial advice business based in Languedoc Roussillon, then using the location as part of the title can work very well, especially in combination with the other techniques illustrated.
SEO strategies are detailed in some depth on my blog under the label SEO search engine optimization. which is well worth a visit if you are interested in exactly how this is done, particularly how and where to place keywords in your content and titles.
Link Building Strategies
The link building techniques that anyone can apply are highlighted in red along with the utilisation of squeeze lists. This can be a bit too laborious for many people, but often when designing a website we can put a number of links in place to help you get kick started. You may even find that, for the less competitive scenarios mentioned, this is all you need to get a good position and then you may be able to let nature take its course i.e. you will find people interested in your business will bookmark and link to your website; which is exactly what you want.
Another great tool that any small business can use to give their business much needed publicity is the Google Local Businesses tool. A completely free service that allows you to claim your business and promote it through Google, especially useful when you have a supporting website.
Performance Monitoring
This is an aspect of SEO you need to consider at an early stage because it requires code to be added to the web pages you want to track. The benefits of measuring web site performance is relatively obvious:
- to find out how many visitors your site is getting
- where those visitors reside geographically
- what the most popular pages are
- who is referring visitors to your site
- the keywords that brought your visitors
There are more reasons but these bullets cover the primary ones. There are a number of software resources that will measure these parameters for you, but the one recommended is 'Google Analytics'. A free tool you can use that provides all the functions listed plus many more. You are required to register with Google and place their code on your pages, but this is pretty standard of any performance measuring software. You can visit Web site Performance Monitoring for a more detailed account of the subject.
We offer a basic SEO starter package to get you up and running which you can find on the prices page. All meta tag details and keyword inclusion are provided as part of the standard design package but we can also provide a keyword analysis service to identify suitable keywords to target for your design if you are unsure how to do this.
Social Signals
An important aspect of any modern SEO campaign now includes a strategy for establishing social signals. At the very least, either as an individual or as a business, you should consider being active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+. There is also a new usurper in town, which is now making its presence very much felt in the social media world, called Pinterest.
The latter is a relatively new social media presence and relies primarily on graphical images to grab attention. So in order to maximise your presence on Pinterest you really need to be utilising highly attractive graphical images that can be added to a board of your own making and these can then be linked to your business pages on your website or blog. If the images are popular, they are repinned by others giving you additional highly coveted links to your business pages.
Facebook LinkedIn and Google+ offer similar functionality to one another in terms of you being able to create business pages and post relevant and interesting information about your business activities there. Twitter on the other hand is a microblogging facility that allows you to create an account under several different guises. As a business it would be worth your while starting an account and engaging with other users of Twitter that have similar interests or potentially would be intersted in products or services that you may offer.
One thing to remember with all the social media sites, is that the audience is there to be engaged with, not sold to.
By engaging with others, answering their questions and helping them out you can build a trust relationship and then, when you are trusted, people are more likely to consider your products and services. They will see them as coming from a trustworthy, reliable and helpful source. It's not really any more complicated than that, but then actually achieving the required level of trust is where most people will struggle. It is actually quite hard work to be able to consistently engage with people through social media sites well running, what is likely to be, a time consuming business. So bear in mind that if you are resource strapped it may be better to have a real presence and engage on one or two social media sites properly, rather than paying lip service to many more.
 |
 |
 |
 |
|---|
