Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) seems like a mystical, mysterious process to a lot of small business owners.
Just the fact that it seems so mysterious has played right into the hands of many companies that sell SEO services at thousands of dollars per month. The sad thing is that many of those companies are the modern-day version of snake oil peddlers who don’t fully understand proper SEO themselves! Even a lot of advertising agencies don’t quite "get it" when it comes to SEO – but they still sell the service to their clients anyway. So what’s a small business owner to do? The answer: do it yourself.
The good news it that SEO isn’t hard to do at all. It’s really quite easy. All it requires is attention to specific details.
The trick to doing your own SEO work is patience and perseverance. It’s not rocket science. It’s doesn’t involve complicated formulas. All it requires is that you do a little planning, pay attention to specific details on your site, and "tweak" those details as needed. In fact, most of it revolves around selecting the right keywords and using them in the right places on your site.
Now before I get started, let me state the obvious…
In order to do your own SEO work, you’ll need to have access to make changes to your website. Ideally your site would be built on a content management system that lets you log in and make changes without needing web design software. However, if your site is not built that way, you can either buy some web design software (like Adobe Dreamweaver for example), or you can assume the role of "project manager" and give your existing web designer specific instructions on what you want changed. Either way would work.
Now that we have that out of the way, here are specific things you can do to increase your site’s SEO:
1. Be search engine "friendly"
Start by taking a close look at your website. How is it built?
If the bulk of your site content is built in Adobe Flash, or if all the text is actually images, then you need to start from scratch. How can you tell? Well, if all the content on your site (including the text) loads as part of a whole-page animation, then your site is most likely Flash-based.
Also, if you place your mouse cursor over the text on your site, hold down the left-click button on your mouse and drag to the side, does it highlight the text or does the text seem to come off the page in a chunk? If it comes off as one chunk, then your site is probably image based. If you still can’t tell after trying these tests, ask the person that built it for you.
Why is this important? Search engines use automated software called "spiders" or "robots" to rank websites, and those robots cannot read text that is in Flash files or image files. All the search engine sees is an image. And without being able to read the text on your site, the search engines basically see an empty site, which actually hurts your search engine ranking. In order for search engines to properly index (read) your site, you need to have all the main content as actual HTML text.
It’s OK to have images and animations on your site, just don’t make those the primary content. Use them as "window dressing" to enhance your content instead.
2. Plan your use of keywords
Keywords are an area a lot of small business owners get stuck on, or go overboard with. The important thing to do is to plan your use of keywords. Having too many keywords is just as bad as not using the right ones. Also, you want to try and target your keywords by location as much as possible. Let’s look at some specifics on how to do this…
First of all, be selective about which keywords you target. Don’t just cram your meta tags and content full of as many keywords as you can think of. That’s called "keyword stuffing" and search engines penalize for that.
Instead, do some research and some serious thinking about what keywords are most applicable to what you sell and compare that to what keywords your customers actually search for. For example, if you sell gift baskets in the state of Michigan, instead of using a crazy long string of keywords like "gift, basket, gift basket, baskets, gifts, etc" use something like "holiday gift baskets michigan" as one keyword string then maybe "birthday gift baskets michigan" as another. The point is, if you focus on a few highly target keywords you’ll get better results.
Some online tools that will help you choose your keywords are Google’s Keyword Tool, SpyFu, and WordTracker.
3. Be smart with your header tags
When you’re editing the text on your site and you need a big, bold headline in the text, don’t just make the text bold and change the type size.
Make use of HTML header tags.
These tags are built right into HTML and are usually numbered H1 through H6 with H1 being the largest and sizes getting smaller from there. The reason this is important is because search engines see header tag content as being more important than the rest of the text. So you want to try and work important keywords into your header tags as much as possible, but be smart about it. Using the gift basket example above, you might have a page on your site with information on special gift baskets you do for birthdays. In that case, an appropriate "H1" header for that page would be "Birthday Gift Baskets from Your Company." And just like with keywords, don’t go "hog wild" with this using tons of header tags all over your page. Be smart about it, plan it out and work in some targeted keywords for best results.
4. Use image descriptions (alt tags)
As I mentioned earlier, search engines can’t see what’s in an image so it’s important to tell them what the image is using the "alt" tag (also called an image description). Think of a short sentence that describes your image and use that in your alt tag. If your image applies to any of the keywords you’ve chosen, find a way to work those keywords into your sentence.
The other reason image descriptions are important is to help folks with a disability be able to navigate your site. There are software programs out there that allow people with blindness or other disabilities to browse the web. These programs achieve this by literally reading the web page to the person. Providing image descriptions help these people by making it easier for them to access the information on your site and know what is there.
5. Use keyword-optimized URLs and Titles
This one is a biggie. Take the keywords you’ve decided on and work them into your website’s page URLs and the page title tags.
For example (again using the gift basket example above), if you had a page on your site that was about holiday gif baskets you sold, the actual page address (called a URL) should be something like http://www.yourcompany.com/holiday-gift-baskets-michigan.html. The important points here is to only use keywords that coincide with the content of the page, never have spaces in the URL (use-hyphens-instead), and keep it down to 3 or 4 keywords.
Also, each page of your site has a space for a title – make sure you use it! Insert a page title that accurately reflects the content of the page and uses your keywords where appropriate. Also, put your company name AFTER the description in the title. For example, for the holiday gift baskets page above, the title might read something like "Holiday Gift Basket Selections from Your Company." The reason to put your company name last is it gives priority to the keywords at the front of the title, which search engines like to see.
6. Be smart with your meta tags
Meta tags are those "invisible" fields of content hidden in the code of your website that tell the search engines things like the keywords that relate to your site, the description of your site, whether or not to index a certain page, etc. There’s a lot of debate about the effectiveness of meta tags these days.
However, the general consensus is that it’s still a good idea to use them. I especially encourage you to use the description meta tag for each page on your site and write a short, one sentence description of what that page is all about, working in your keywords for that page.
Doing this will display that description in search results instead of something random the search engine selects (like the copyright notice), and will make your page appear more relevant to the keywords you used. And remember, keep it short. Google only displays 152 characters (including spaces) as a site description before it cuts off. So if you try to keep your descriptions about the same length as a Twitter post, you’ll be in good shape.
7. Test and monitor
The last thing you need to do is track your progress. This is an area where patience comes into play.
The search engines only update their information periodically – in some cases only once every 90 days or so. So you’ll need to be patient while they update their listings, and periodically check to see how your site ranks when you search for one of the keywords you chose. If you’re still not happy with your rank, there are things you can do, but it’s a process of making adjustments, then monitoring the results until you get your site where you want it to be.
And don’t forget this is an ongoing process. In other words, you can’t do this once and then forget it. Keep in mind there are other people out there just like you who are trying to get their site to rank higher too. So keep at it to keep your site well ranked.
This will get you started in the right direction
Keep in mind that these tips only deal with optimizing your website and making it more search engine friendly. Your actual rank in the search engines also involves thinks like how many sites link to yours, the quality of those links, how long your web address has been registered (and how long until it expires), and how often you post fresh content to your site to name just a few. These are all topics I’ll be covering in future articles, but if you start with the tips above to get your site optimized and ready for some of those "next steps," you’ll have a strong foundation to build on.