SEO tips and advice for small business owners, which will hopefully answer most of the important questions typically asked by small businesses. If there is something I haven’t addressed here, feel free to contact me and I may write a post on it.
If you’re looking for SEO consulting services, get in touch! Contact Form – 817.501.7098 – clint@wiredseo.com – I’m on Google+!
“Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” – T.S. Eliot
When people search for a particular service, they are more likely to land on a dedicated service page than a generic page that has a bunch of services listed. Creating dedicated pages for each service you offer lends you a lot more SEO opportunities, and will help your site rank higher in search engines when users are looking for your specific service. Read more →
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone number. Essentially, it’s your basic information across the web. How your NAP appears across the web can affect your ranking in organic search results and very much affects where you rank in Google’s local map results. Below, an example of a lovely NAP…
Perfect Pies Pie Shop 4567 Elm St. Fort Worth, TX 76116 (817) 987-6543
Your NAP should be listed on your website and social accounts, but it may also appear in online directories, many of which focus on local business data. This includes sites like Yelp, YellowPages, CitySearch, your local chamber of commerce, Super Pages, Foursquare, and even sites specific to your niche/industry.
Each occurrence of your business information on a directory or local listing site is referred to as a “citation” (more specifically a “structured citation“, but we’ll stick w/ using citation for simplicity sake). You’ll want to keep track of all citations.
Operating an e-commerce website is a lot different from operating a service-based site, community site, or any site where your main goal is not too sell products.
Rather than going through a lot of general SEO tips, I’m going to list out specific SEO tips that E-Commerce sites can use.
Have you witnessed a dip in organic traffic to your site? It’s possible that you are being penalized for violating Google Webmaster Guidelines.
It’s important to keep in mind, Google doesn’t care whether you hired a sketchy SEO firm or tried to game Google yourself -– if your site is hit with a penalty, you’re the one that must deal with it.
Now, truth be told, there are many reasons why a decrease in organic search traffic can occur. Before you go straight to penalization first consider these common causes of traffic loss…
While these SEO tips are certainly effective for all types of websites, I wrote these with the small business owner in mind. These can all be incorporated in your current marketing initiatives. They cover a very broad spectrum of online marketing elements — Analytics, Accessibility, Indexation, On-Site, Off-Site, Content, Link-Building, Keywords, Markup, as well as general web marketing practices.
Some of these tips are fairly easy to implement, while others are more time consuming (and expensive). So I decided to separate it out by how long they take to complete.
Read more →
There are many reasons why a company or small business would want to start a blog – brand reinforcement, customer engagement, positioning yourself as a thought leader in the industry. All of that is excellent, and are actually points I push on clients. But today I’d like to talk about the SEO (search engine optimization) value of small business blogging and how to optimize for organic traffic to your site.
Most companies and small business owners know what a blog is. In my experience, most fall into one of these categories…
1) No Blog – You know about blogs, but you aren’t sure how effective it could be as a marketing tool, so you haven’t tried it
Many small business owners have been introduced to the idea of building links or “backlinks” for the purpose of increasing search traffic. For those of you that aren’t aware, links are part of SEO (search engine optimization) or what determines where your web pages will rank in Google’s search results. When I say links, I’m referring to the hyperlinks from another site pointing into your own site.
Example – One example would be a Resources page on a website that lists out related websites that are helpful to their users. Those are the types of links that can affect the visibility of your website in the search results.
External Backlinks
The total of all the links that point in to your domain is called your backlink profile.
Page Titles or “Title Tags” are those large hyperlinks that appear in the search results after you search something in Google, or other search engine. They are used to describe the content of each page.
Page Titles are one of the main SEO (search engine optimization) ranking factors Google uses to determine where web pages appear in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
In the search results, Page Titles look like this…
