SEO for Small Business Websites

For most small to medium size websites it is possible, with a little training and help, to achieve a good search engine rank by understanding the optimization process and then applying some basic optimisation practices.

Even if you don’t intend to do it yourself it is well worth acquiring a basic understanding as it will help in talking to the SEO consultant or web designer that will be doing it.

There are 4 aspects to the optimisation process.

Keyword Research - Finding and choosing the best Keywords to target
Web Page Optimisation- Optimising the web page copy and Meta Tags for the correct keywords.
Linking- Establishing inbound links via various methods like directories submission, article marketing,, blogging.
Site structure - Creating an optimized site Navigation structure.

Many new small business site owners make the mistake of either not optimising their site/pages at all, or optimise for the wrong keywords.

Take for example a fictitious company called “Jones the Plumber”. Here is the home page.

jones-plumber

Now imaging someone sitting at Google/Yahoo/MSN searching for a local plumber. Do you think they will type:

I think the answer is pretty obvious, and yet when you look at the starting text of the main page the emphasis is on the non important words and not the important ones.

This is simple to cure but you will be amazed at how many websites make this very elementary mistake.

To make sure that you don’t, I’ve put together a website optimization mini course which shows you the four steps to an optimised web site.