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Seven Ways to Make Google Love Your Small Business Website Are you a small business with a web site, but are disappointed at how poorly it seems to be performing? If you’re frustrated because your website appears on page 42 of the Google search results, here are seven things you can do to quickly improve. 1. Create Effective Title, Description and Keyword Meta Tags As a small business owner, you should work closely with your web development team to develop meta tags for your web site. Meta tags are “data describing data” that provide a sort of shorthand way for search engines to understand, class and rank your site’s content and relevance. How they’re constructed can make a big difference in how highly you come up in response to search requests. Curious to know what your title, description, meta and keyword tags currently look like? Just go to any page of your website, then click on "View Source" or "View Page Source" from the "View" menu. There you’ll be able to see exactly what your tags are telling Google when they crawl your site. For search engines, the most important part of any website is the title tag. The title is enclosed between the opening title tag: Use your page’s main keyword in your title. Try to use your main keyword near the beginning of your title, and perhaps again near the end. But always strive to make your title readable, and not obviously keyword stuffed. Your description tag plays an important role in search engine optimization (SEO) for your local small business. This tag is used by most of the search engines in their listings, so you need to spend some time getting this right. The description tag looks like this: and it is also found in the head section of your web page. Something brief such as, "Acme Incorporated, Widget Makers," gets the message across, but you could do better listing benefits and using keywords in your description as well. "Acme, Inc., Makers of the Strongest, Most Powerful and Affordable Widgets on the Planet" is better. Like a headline for an ad or sales flyer, your description may take time to develop. Start with a list of all of the benefits your product or service offers and then try to write 20 different descriptions for your site based on those benefits. Test your descriptions by reading them to your customers, employees and others. The keywords tag, also found in the head section of your web pages, looks like this: . The keywords you choose for your page are important, because they tell the search engines what should be found on the page. Google and all the other search engines present search results based on relevancy - how relevant your web pages are to the keywords and phrases your prospects are searching for. Keep your keyword phrases to less than seven and don’t repeat the same words. For example, if you draft two keyword phrases, one of which is "blue widgets" and the other of which is "bright blue widgets,' then don’t use the second one. Only list unique words after including the first "blue widgets" keyword.
2. Optimize Your Website Copy 3. Establish an Acceptable Keyword Density for Your Website Copy While optimizing your website copy, you also need to establish a keyword density that is acceptable to the search engines. Opinions differ, but somewhere between 2% and 5% is probably about right. That means for effective small business SEO, your main keyword phrase should appear around three times for every 100 words.
4. Create Quality Back Links to Your Website Increasingly, the search engines are giving added weight to the number of quality back links your website has. It used to be that reciprocal linking was quite acceptable, and it still is, but now Google and the other search engines give higher credibility to one-way back links as far as your search engine rankings are concerned. And it’s not just any back links either. You need to have quality back links, or back links from sites that are similar to yours. It’s not much good getting a back link from a site about butterflies if your site focuses on racing cars. With Google, it’s all about relevance. You should also strive to get back links from so-called authority sites. These are sites that the search engines deem to be an authority on their chosen subject. They tend to be quite big and to have been around for some time. 5. Use Local Directories Effectively If you are marketing to a local market, then make use of local directories. How do you find them? If, for example, you are located in New York, then go to Google and search for, "directory" + "new york". This will return a list of all the local directories in that city. You could even try searching for, "blue widgets directory" + "new york", if you are marketing blue widgets. Once you find a suitable directory, submit your website to it. People do search on local directories, so even if your product has worldwide appeal, there’s a greater chance that you will get the sale if someone finds you in a local directory over someone else located in another continent who can deliver just as cost effectively or as quickly. 6. Create a Proper Site Map and Google Site Map Every website should have a site map. This is merely a directory of all your site’s pages with links to every one. You should have a link from every page of your site back to your site map, and your site map must be updated whenever a new page is added. A Google Site Map is also a site map, but one that is in a special format that Google can easily spider. It has the great advantage of allowing Google to instantly "see" your site and evaluate it. It can be a very useful tool in getting Google to index your site more quickly than otherwise. For more information on creating a Google Site Map, go to: http://www.google.com/ webmasters/sitemaps/. 7. Add Fresh Original Content to Your Website at an Acceptably Measured Pace
Another great way to add content to your website quickly, easily and at an acceptably measured pace is to start your own blog. In an upcoming article, I’ll tell you how amazing a blog can be for your small or medium-sized business and why you need to have one.
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