Ten Simple SEO Suggestions
Today I’d like to start tackling Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is more commonly known. For many small businesses, in order to get noticed, they have to two choices: (1) Organic – Show up in search results, or (2) Paid Per Click or PPC Adwords – Show up in Advertising. If you’re a small business in America these days, your budgets are tight and your margins are tighter. In a perfect world, you’d drive all of your Internet traffic to your site via Organic search results – that’s where SEO comes into play and these days, SEO really means On-Page SEO which is another way of saying content.
So obviously, Content is King with Google; always has been – always will be. But organizing your content and how you deliver it could make the difference between showing up on the first page and showing up on page 3! Google’s latest update, Panda, placed a greater importance on ‘On-Page SEO’. No longer are backlinks and simply pinging or sending out a RSS feed the key to getting Google PageRank or Alexa Rankings; you need to implement On-Page SEO.
So what is On-Page SEO? Here are a few tips that you can and should do that will help you with your rankings quest:
- First your keyword should appear in the title; look at today’s topic “SEO and the Search Wars”. Notice how I used my key SEO phrase ‘SEO’ as my lead?
- Try and have your keyword appear in the URL – not mandatory, but very helpful
- Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page
- You should optimize your keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing).
- How Does Latent Semantic Indexing Work? Latent semantic indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text.
- Header tags: Header tags are an important on-page SEO factor because they’re used to communicate to the search engines what your website is about. Search engines recognize the copy in your header tags as more important than the rest. This starts with your h1 and works its way down in importance to the h2, h3 and so on. These tags will help support the overall theme or purpose of your page.
- You should have relevant usage of Bold and italics of your keyword.
- There should be one internal link to a page on your blog.
- You should also try and include an image on your page
- Remember to place an alt tag on the picture that has your keyword
- Promote your page using ‘Social’ networks. This blog is promoted via the Saint George LinkedIn account. We decided to ‘link’ our Twitter account to our LinkedIn account; that way, every time we want to communicate with our networks, we log into our LinkedIn account and use their tool to simultaneously share what we’re up to with our network and our Twitter feed followers
- Always include a URL back to your website – you never know where or to whom your Email, Tweet, LinkedIn Share, or Facebook posting will end up. If you include a link and if it crosses my desk and I’m interested in your stuff, you’ve just made it that much easier for me to engage with you online.
Of course, you’ve just read the simplistic version of SEO. It helps to know how to structure your phraseology and organize your pages, menus and content in a way that the major players like them. If you have some intelligent employees that can spare a few hours a week, you should task them to this important project. At the end of the day, SEO comes down to informative, engaging content; and that just takes a commitment and time. We’ve found that for most small businesses, having made a commitment to their online presence, they just do not have the time or resources to effectively manage their website. If this sounds familiar and you can’t spare the time or the personnel to properly manage your website, you should contact Saint George and talk to us about managing your website’s SEO.
Next time we’re going down the Social Network Rabbit Hole – who knows where that will lead? Maybe more SEO points?
Best,
Saint George
