What Business Owners Need to Know about Search Engine Optimization
"If you build it, they will come."
If only it were that easy! It's not so with baseball teams (of the non-ghostly variety), shopping malls, or websites. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, requires ongoing effort and a wide range of skills, some of which you can do yourself, and some of which you'll want to outsource to a web designer who understands SEO. There are no quick fixes, no magic bullets, and any company that offers you a "Top 10 on Google" guarantee probably doesn't really have your best interests in mind.
Begin at the Beginning
The best time to begin thinking about SEO is before you begin building your website. Unless your business is highly specialized with little competition, or highly localized with little competition, no one will find you unless your website has, at the very least, search engine friendly design. What does this mean?
- Your website has many separate pages, each with its own URL. (Full-Flash websites are often designed as one page – the whole website has the same URL.)
- The pages of your website contain relevant textual content (not pictures of text).
- Your pages have titles and meta tags.
- Your site does not use frames.
- If you use a content management system, the URLs are rewritten to be search engine friendly (they contain no question marks).
- The file size of each of your pages is under 150k. Larger pages may not be fully cached by search engines.
- New websites should be submitted to major search engines (submission does not guarantee ranking - it just helps you not be "invisible")
Already have a website, and you're not sure if it was built with these SEO best practices? Don't worry. The second-best time to begin thinking about SEO is right now.
A Word About Website Redesigns
If your website is already built, and you've been getting traffic to it, you don't want to lose what ground you've got! If there are pages in the old design that no longer exist in the new design, redirecting users (and search engines) to the appropriate page in the new site will prevent any “404 – Page Not Found” errors. Ask your designer whether they plan to do this, and how. Their answer should include words like “server-side script” or “301 redirect.” (301 is the code that search engines interpret as “moved permanently,” and it can be implemented in numerous ways, depending on the way the website is built.)
Why A “First on Google” Guarantee Isn't Always So Great
It sounds good, right? Who doesn't want their website showing up at the top of that long, long list? But the question you need to ask is, “First on Google for what?” For your business name? That should go without saying! For your keywords? That sounds better, but it's only going to bring traffic to your website if they're keywords that people are actually searching for. A more useful and realistic goal is to increase the amount of traffic to your website that is generated by search engines.
Keywords, Demystified
Keywords are just words, really. They're the important words in your website that you want search engines to focus on. You build this focus in two ways – by frequency, and by including the words in your page's title and meta-tags (these are parts of your website that aren't visible, but exist to clarify the content of your website for search engines). You and your SEO partner should be looking for three specific qualities when choosing your keywords:
- Popularity – The number of times this word is searched for on the Internet.
- Relevance – It's no use optimizing for widgets when you sell gadgets, or for roses when you only sell daisies.
- Competition – Let's face it, Barnes & Noble is going to rank higher than the small local bookstore every time for the keywords they're optimized for. The goal for the small business owner is to capitalize on other keywords that the big name players may have overlooked.
This is where knowing your business meets the art of SEO – balancing all three of these qualities requires research and industry knowledge. Once you've chosen the keywords for your website, you may need to rewrite some of your content to improve the frequency with which these words appear. However, increasing keyword frequency should never be done at the expense of quality, readable content. After all, if no one wants to read your website, it will ultimately hurt your rankings.
More is... More.
One of the factors search engines look at is how many inbound links connect to your website. For example, if Joe's website mentions Jane's website in an article, and links to her website, that is one inbound link. If Jane's website has 5 pages, and all of them link to her home page, that's 5 inbound links. This system gives a huge advantage to large websites – Amazon.com, for instance, has tens of thousands (maybe millions?) of pages linking to its home page! For your small business website, this means that you want as many pages in your website as you can create meaningful content for. Meaningful content can take many forms, including:
- forums
- blogs
- how-to's
- articles and advice
Even more powerful than inbound links from your own domain are links from other, well-ranked domains. Ideally, your website link will appear in a context that describes what you do, rather than on a list. Watch out for "link farms" that offer to sell you links to your website - these can actually hurt your search engine ranking!
Keep It Current
Updating your website shows both search engines and human readers that your website hasn't been forgotten. Ideally, you'll update your website at least every 3 months. At an absolute minimum, you should review your website annually and delete any outdated information, and add new information where you can.
What You Can Do Today, and What to Look For In An SEO Partner
You can make good initial improvements to your search engine ranking by working with a knowledgeable web designer to improve the content of your website. You can also generate more traffic to your website by frequenting forums and blogs that deal with your industry, and making relevant comments (normally, your name will link to your website). Most businesses will want to outsource the more in-depth optimization, including keyword optimization and research. When choosing an SEO partner, look for a company who understands the long-term commitment involved in getting real results. Avoid "Black-Hat" operations - once upon a time, SEO meant packing your website with "invisible" text that matched the site's background, repeating your keywords over and over. Today, that sort of tactic is likely to get you blacklisted by search engines.
Dreamkissed Design believes that the best results come from partnerships - combining our technical expertise with your industry knowledge. Small investments and continual improvements over time are more powerful than a huge initial investment that is then allowed to stagnate. That's how we work. That's how your small business gets noticed.