SEO - Help Your Business Survive in a Competitive Market

What is SEO?

Well without spelling it out in too many words, it's simply marketing for your shop. With a high street store you need to have people either walk past your shop front, or you have to reach them through other mediums, like TV, radio or print. With a website it's not quite the same, as potential customers cannot stumble across your site without it being around in the search engines. SEO helps your site become visible to people searching for phrases related to your industry. So unless you want to pay a fortune on Adwords and Pay Per Click on the main search engines, then it's time to take SEO seriously.

Blog and Content

One thing that is sure to set you apart from non-performing websites is having fresh relevant text on your page and on other blog sites. You can set up your own site, have the blog on your existing site with a sub domain, or pay someone to write the content for you. It is much easier to just do it yourself - locate some blogs that are SEO friendly, register and start to be involved in the discussions. This helps lots if you end up with people finding your site free of charge, and also helps your link building for SEO

Relevant Content

Many people performing SEO come unstuck as they are not dedicated to the topic or subject matter. Let me explain... If you out-source your website optimization then you are giving your shop and the contents to someone who probably doesn't understand your industry. If you sell flowers on your site, and ask a company to create a landing page to get up the rankings for 'flower delivery Manchester', and then there is a good chance they would not know where to start. For this reason they would probably fill the page with a few keywords they think are relevant, then fill the rest of the page with generic rubbish. This is not good SEO practice and never will be! Think of your key phrases, decide on the density then write some good content - you know your business better than anyone- and Google loves fresh, new, appropriate text.

Page size

It's a small part of SEO granted, but still important to remember that page size can be a factor in organic search engine results. Whatever phrase you are looking to optimize, just look at the top 10 on Google and you will see the page sizes are mostly under 50kb. This is a size that I would recommend being the maximum for most landing pages. The best way to achieve this is to have smaller pictures and a less complicated navigation, but there are many other ways to keep it down.

Website Directories

If you are new to SEO and have seen the many adverts out there for directory submissions, it may seem very tempting. There are so many thousands of directories on the internet, it's hard to know where to find the right ones for your market. Also, 1000 submissions for $200 might seem like an easy way to get round the process. In my experience however, it's really important to have incoming links from quality sites that don't just spam 100's of links on badly optimized pages. An Indian company I used many years ago ended up submitting one of my own sites to over 500 directories with a page rank of '0', when all should have been a minimum of '2'. Also, the pages where my site was listed had nothing to do with our industry, it was a mix of anything and everything. There are many free directories that we would recommend, with a few that are very important to be listed in due to their high Alexa rank and PageRank. It may be an idea to look deeper into specialist websites that have a complete section dedicated to what you are offering.

Link Building

Every website needs to have a theme, and to help create a theme the site should have permanent backlinks. Basically a backlink is a hyperlink that points to your website from another website. The text that is displayed on a hyperlink is called the 'anchor text', and this is the phrase that the search engines will associate with your website.

Keywords

It's just so important that 'Keywords' are in your thoughts when setting up your site. The engines like to see a theme on a page or whole site. Try to imagine what your customers are going to type into a search box when potentially looking for your products or services. Depending on how many phrases you come up with, you will then need to work out how many pages to create. Try to work around the 4-6 keywords per page, unfortunately this means if you come up with 500 key phrases, then you'll need about 100 pages, but when needs must...

Google optimisation

Google is still the biggest search engine, in terms of users, despite the others catching up a little. It has around 60% of all searches on the internet, and is the Holy Grail when it comes to optimisation and key phrase rankings. The best and worst thing about Google for people wanting to succeed, is the fact that they try their very best to keep the search results pure. It's the best reason because it stops the majority of rubbish getting to the top of the rankings by using spamming techniques. It's a bad thing because it means there is no easy fix, no rapid rankings, no magic formula to getting to number 1.