Today marks the start of month long festivity celebrating small businesses as part of Victorian Government initiative-Energise Enterprise Festival. This post is basic guide on Search Engine Optimisation for small businesses.
- Check whether your website has been indexed by Google. A simple way to do this is to use the following command:site : http://www.yourwebsite.com.au on www.google.com.au If it shows results, it means your site has been indexed by Google. The results it lists are the pages of your website included in Google’s index. Remember to be indexed is the first step to getting rankings.
- If your site has not been indexed by Google, one of the measures you can take is to get it indexed is by listing your website on reputed free directories like http://www.hotfrog.com.au
- Check the permissions to the search engine spiders to different folders on your site by typing www.yourwebsite.com.au/robots.txt. If you are among the 76% of the small business websites that don’t have robot definitions then visit Google Webmaster Forum and insert the code into your website
- Now that your site has got indexed by Google, the next step is to review the onpage elements on your website. These include title tags (the blue baron the top of your web-page), meta-descriptions (these are located in the source code of your website which can be accessed by right clicking the mouse button and choosing the view source button, and site keywords (also included in the source code). Make sure that the words which people most frequently use to find your products or services are used in these tags in a meaningful way
- If you are not sure, which keywords work best for you, see the keywords your competition are using. Also ask your prospects/customers what they would type in Google to find your products/services. To verify the actual search volumes for these keywords, use the following Keyword research tool . Make sure you select the target country to get the correct search volume
- Customise your website content to naturally include these keywords in the top few lines and the last few lines of your text. Do not have more than 7-8 keywords per page
- Make your page names in line with the keywords you are targeting e.g, a page targeting the word ‘luxury resorts’ should have the word in the subdomain (e.g www.yourwebsite.com/luxury-resorts). Another page targeting Bali Luxury Villas should have the name www.yourwebsite.com/Bali-luxury-villas.
- When changing page names, use a 301 redirect to give the information to the search engine. see : http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633
- Create inner links from different pages of your website with the relevant keywords as anchor text. Anchor text is the visible, clickable part of a hyperlink
- Put alt tags in images (alt tags are text inserted behind an image to indicate what the image is about). Here you can include keywords where applicable and remember not to be spammy.
- Provide useful content and resources on your website so that webmasters link to your site. It could be a compilation of resources which people look for, a blog providing industry insights or whitepapers. Tools, Calculators etc are also useful
- Install Google Analytics to monitor how much traffic your website is getting, what sources does this traffic come from, how much time do visitors spend on each page of your website and what action do they perform. You can use this data to make ongoing improvements to your site and improve the usage metrics
- Put your images into image sharing sites and videos into video sharing sites. When doing this use appropriate tags and descriptions based on relevance and targeted keywords.
Finally if all this sounds like Greek to you, that’s what we are here for. Call us for an SEO consultation. If you are in Melbourne, you can join us for one of our breakfast internet marketing seminars.
