Small Business Management: Maximizing Your Website
Topic: Growing Your Business,Marketing,Small Business Marketing,Solopreneur,Tech Tools | Comments (1)
PART 1: Introduction to SEO & Recommended Reading
At WorkingPoint we want to provide you with all the best possible tools for your business to flourish. We know that using WorkingPoint’s Small Business Accounting tool has freed up your valuable time, so now you can focus on things like improving your marketing to generate more revenue.
In this day and age, having a website is pretty essential for any successful business. Whether or not you actually sell something online, your website will increasingly become the primary way for your customers to find you. Unfortunately, the more commonplace websites become (and the more people use them to shop), the more competition there is to attract customers using web traffic.
The best way to make your website work for your business is by making it as easy to find as possible. The technical term for this is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
If you as a consumer have ever used the internet to shop and/or search for a place to shop, then at some point you have probably entered a search term into a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing. Understanding how people search is the first step to understanding SEO.
If you’re like most searchers, when you are looking for something you will enter that term into a search engine. The search engine will then generate a list of results like this one:
You will look at the top response (maybe top 2-3 if you’re really savvy comparison shopper) and then you will navigate away from the search page to those websites. What does that mean for your business? If you want your website to work for you, you need to get to the top of that list!
In SEO terms, where your website falls in the list generated by these search engines is called your “rank”. The highest rank is the top of the list. SEO tactics are about how to make yourself rank higher which will make your website easier to find. This sounds like a good thing, right?
Below are a list of some of the best, easiest to understand and most useful resources we’ve found to help you navigate the tricky world of SEO.
SEOMoz’s guide is a must read if you are new to the concepts of SEO/SEM.
Before you dig into the tactics, having a global vision of the concept is
essential to demonstrating your strategy.
This graphic goes a long way to illustrating the steps that Google takes when it searches.
Understanding these steps will help you to make the process as easy for Google as possible,
thereby optimizing your search.
“HOW TO: Optimize Your Site for Search Engine Marketing”
Ben Parr’s article for Mashable breaks down the 6 steps to understand
Ben Parr’s article for Mashable breaks down the 6 steps to understand
(and hopefully use) SEM tactics for your website.
Corbett Barr at ThinkTraffic.com provides the best step by step explanation for using keywords.
Once you have optimized for these keywords in your SEM then you can actively begin to implement SEO tactics. All of these writers agree that SEM tactics, adwords and on page optimization are important. But because you can control them, they make up only a small part of how your website is going to rank. Most experts agree that the most important factor in SEO is “inbound links” which we’ll visit tomorrow in Part 2. On page optimization and paid search are essential ingredients in effective SEO; having them in place is essential for your SEO strategy to be effective.
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