Small businesses across the nation are struggling to survive in today's economy. However, there are effective Internet Marketing Methods that, when used properly, allow even small businesses to compete with larger corporations. This, part 1 of a 12 part series, addresses perhaps the easiest change that business owners can make to their websites; and that is optimizing their website for search engine traffic.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
The common term is SEO, and it is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to your web site, usually through natural or organic search results. There are basically three types of search results found during an Internet search, the paid results, the local results, and the natural or organic results.
Making sure your website it properly optimized will help improve the rankings when information is published throughout the natural results portion of searches.
And, this is probably the most important, free method for promoting your business website.
How Does SEO Work?
Basically, by making certain changes to your website, you can help it rank higher in the search engines for various keywords. And, the higher the search engines rank your site, the more traffic it can achieve.
Search engine "spiders" crawl the Internet looking for specific components and relevant information on each website. Correctly naming these components on your website will make a difference in how easily the spiders can see it.
How to Optimize Your Website
There are several on-page optimization factors that can make your pages search-engine friendly and more relevant for the search engines. First, build each page of your site and your content around the specific keywords for your business.
Next, understand that there are six areas on each web page that could be optimized correctly with those keywords. These include:
Title tags
Meta tags
Header tags
Internal link structure
URL structure, and
Structure of the Content
For an example, if you were a chiropractor in Michigan, one keyword phrase you should probably use would be: Ann Arbor, Michigan Chiropractor. This phrase should show up in your Title tag - found at the very top of your Internet browser (you should also include others). This is one of the first places the spiders read when they arrive at a website.
Most companies make the mistake of only putting their business name up there, which limits the traffic to people who already know they exist. If someone doesn't know your business name to start with, they will not know your company name to search for. So, they begin searching for your business using the keywords that will solve their problem.
Think of More Keywords
By including keyword phrases in each of the six areas of each of your web pages, you increase the readability for the spiders to index it correctly, and rank it higher in the search engines.
And, keep in mind which long-tail keyword phrases your prospects may be typing in a search engine to find your business. These are the keyword phrases you must incorporate throughout your website. Include them in your blog postings, article titles, and even as your graphic image titles.
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