Common Sense SEO For Small Business

Too Much Graphic Content in Relation to Text Content Hurts Your SEO

2010-06-17T11:23:00.000-04:00

This is Part 5 " Too Much Graphic Content In Relation To Text Content Hurts Your SEO Efforts" of Our 10 Part Series on the Top Ten Mistakes a Small Business Owner Can Make When Doing Their Own SEO

Flash is neat, but search engine spiders can't translate that wicked cool explosive logo flying in and saving the day. Spiders can't translate that high-resolution jpg of your product. Spiders won't sit down with a bucket of popcorn and watch your short service introduction video. Spiders only do text. Granted you can use some SEO tricks to help out, like using the ALT tag for images or posting a transcript of the video at the bottom of the page. Flash is even coming along way with embedded tags for identifying the content, but none of these are as effective as user readable text. Text is KING, long live TEXT. I know I butchered that one, but hopefully it illustrates the point.

With spiders and crawlers current indexing capabilities a word is worth more than a thousand pictures or videos. Yes, you must in the web world forget the axiom "A picture is worth a thousand words", because it isn't worth squat to a spider. Your viewers may love it, but spiders just ignore. So you must balance your pages with enough graphics to be visually appealing to your users and enough text to make spiders gorge themselves.

Using Irrelevant Keywords For SEO

2010-06-16T07:41:00.002-04:00

This is Part 4 " Using Irrelevant Keywords " of Our 10 Part Series on the Top Ten Mistakes a Small Business Owner Can Make When Doing Their Own SEO

Spammers also tend to try to use a tactic to attract traffic using hot keywords that have no validity to the pages contents. Using the previously mentioned Sam's Pizza, his possibly well meaning nerd nephew who did his site for a summer of free pizza and subs, put in terms like Britney Spears Naked or I hate the Cowboys Football Team into the page somehow. The hope is that a drawn in visitor will perform an action such as buy, sign up for something or somehow close the deal of what the goal of the web page is. This again is a simple, common and overused black hat trick, it may work in the short run, but in the long run you will be found out, lose ranking or be banned from results altogether. This is bad. It also may tick off your potential customers.

Keywords and Key phrases are one of the most critical things you will need to do for SEO. SEO keywords done wrong or SEO Keywords not done at all are just as equally bad. This is the area that you cannot skimp and will need a good SEO Keyword Book, good SEO Keyword Site Tutorial and or other SEO tools.

SEO Spamming is not a good thing

2010-05-08T08:40:00.002-04:00

This is Part 3 Spamming of Our 10 Part Series on the Top Ten Mistakes a Small Business Owner Can Make When Doing Their Own SEO

OK Spamming, spamming web pages is a bit different than both the canned meat product or the e-mail variant. Just like the unwanted e-mail that hammers the same crap over and over again, spamming a page means using a keyword or keywords beyond reasonable expectation. This can be done in a number of ways both visibly and invisibly. Basically, the web page author has thought of the key terms and written them into sections of the page. In case of Invisible Elements, they might add the term(s) dozens or hundreds of times in the METATAGS, or even more Black Hat add the text over and over in font colors that match the background of the page rendering it generally invisible or using the DIV tag element to locate the text of the viewable portion of your browser. They may repeat the keyword(s) at the bottom of the page or off in the right margin and hope the viewer disregards. This is spamming. Using your keywords in image ALT tags (within reason) and Headings and body text, menu items, page names and directories are strong SEO tactics. Just make sure they apply to the page and its content which will leads us to ...

#4 Using irrelevant keywords

Misusing the Title Tag

2010-05-07T20:33:00.002-04:00

This is Part 2 Misusing the Title Tag of Our 10 Part Series on the Top Ten Mistakes a Small Business Owner Can Make When Doing Their Own SEO

Title Tag misuse usually occurs when someone has read something like our tip #1 Ignoring The Title Tag Hurts SEO above and tries to stuff everything possible into the title tag. Well this just doesn't work. But still people try. The Keywords in a title tag are weighted as to their position and overall relevance to the content.

In numerous cases business vanity takes over and people use their formal business name or their catchy motto as their title. Looks good, sounds good right? Wrong. Unless you have huge brand recognition like Coca Cola or Play-Doh you are probably fighting a fools game with your business name. Ask yourself, will people search for you by Business Name or more likely by the product or services you provide?

Anyway, your business name is mentioned (or should be) in many other sections of the page and site and perhaps even the domain name. This should give you enough SEO Juice and mojo to get you to the top when searching for you name.

However, if your Name is your major draw, by all means put it in the title, but you can do so at the end. Also, if you have a common name for your local business like Sam's Pizza, that people may drive by everyday you are best including your name in the title for the little extra SEO Name Juice. Drop in the city or town or county and state at the very end to further boost your localized rankings.

Titles are a major player in any of your Small Business SEO Boosting efforts so read up on them:

Refresher on the roles and rules Title Metatags can play in SEO Design

Best Practices for Title Tags from SEMmoz

In SEO Mistake # 3 Spamming, we will take a broader view of all elements of a page and the effect repeated words (keyword density) can have on SEO for the good and the bad.

Top 10 (Ten) Mistakes Small Business Owners Make When Doing SEO

2010-05-05T10:53:00.000-04:00

This is the first in our 10 part Blog on what we see as the Top 10 (Ten) Mistakes Small Business Owners Make When Doing SEO. This is not a comprehensive list, nor is it necessarily the most egregious errors, they are simple the most common and easiest to remedy to get almost instant results.

This series will hopefully not only point out the errors, but also provide information and resources so that you can either avoid upfront or fix existing SEO problems and errors.

Ok here's our list of what we see as the most common SEO Errors commited by usually well meaning business owners:

#1 Ignoring The Title Tag

#2 Misusing The Title Tag

#3 Spamming

#4 Using Irrelevant Keywords

#5 Too Much Graphic Content In Relation To Text Content

#6 Poor Page Coding

#7 Buying Bad Incoming Links Or Joining Bad Link Exchanges

#8 Skimping On Hosting

#9 Failing To Properly Register Their Site

#10 Thinking They Are Ever Done.

To star t the series here is #1

#1 Ignoring the Title Tag:

This is not only the most common and easiest to fix mistake it is also the one element that provides the most bang for the buck in SEO Terms. Having nothing in your web page's title tag is the equivalent of having no signage in front of your shop which has blacked out windows and the only entrance door somewhere off in the side alley. Without you using a directly expressed meta title tag. You will either have none, or will be indexed using the web page's file name. For most business owners that means that one of the most important primary indexes used to categorize your site in all searches on all search engines will be the words Default, Index or just Home. Slip over to Google and search on the term Index or Home and see where your site could lay in the results. You will probably give up pretty quick (we hope).

Some Resources For How to Fix and to Understand More...

Some Information on Metatags including Title

The People Who Wrote the Book On METADATA

Article: Title Tags Can Provide The Easiest #1 Boost to Small Business SEO

Make sure your title tag is implemented, and implemented well. This brings us to #2 Misusing the Title Tag...

David vs Goliath - SEO for the small guy

2010-04-01T08:57:00.000-04:00

The primary snag in the small business and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) equation really isn’t knowledge. The average small business owners already juggles sales, accounting, inventory, staffing, marketing and countless other hats. SEO just becomes a subset of marketing. No, the main issue with small business web sites when it comes to SEO is TIME. Time, next to cash, is probably the scarcest resource for small business owners and employees.

Time spent doing SEO is time not doing something else to grow the business or just to keep the doors open. In order to do it yourself you need to read, learn and filter through all the ins and outs of SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Without a clear cut, no BS roadmap you need a lot of time.

The average small business is competing locally with a finite number of competitors. These competitors are usually in the same boat as you. Why build a National or International level SEO campaign just to compete with Bob down on Main Street?

What options does this leave you?

Do Nothing – This is the easiest, and least expensive in the short run, But how does this fit as a sound business strategy?
Pay Someone – UCANSEO or one of the thousands of other SEO and SEM firms and individuals out there to do it for you.
Do It Your Self – This traditionally has been done by Buying an Automated SEO Program to do it for you (Not So good) or commiting the time to read through informative, but pack full of stuff you don’t need to know, tomes for Dummies and trying to decipher the what’s what from the techno-babble.

But again, most of these methods and programs are designed or tooled to Dominate the Market, Get #1 on Google (Run from people who promise this) . We strongly feel that for most small business owners SEO can be done fairly simply.

One thing that is often overlooked or misused is the Title Tag. Making changes to this one element on every page on your site could reap huge rewards. Changing your Title Tag for SEO Benefits will not have you beating Coke and Pepsi in the "soda" Search Engine Results Page (SERP), but it will lay a solid foundation and boost your rankings making it easier to compete locally or regionally with other like sized companies.

There are many other simple to not so simple tips and processes that can help in our Basic 10 Step SEO Program for Small Businesses. Our Program consists of logical step-by-step SEO instructions that will have a cumulative positive effect on your SERP for you selected keywords and key phrases. It will teach you what you need to know and not waste your time. You will learn the basics of SEO including:

Keywords and Key Phrases

Where to Submit your Site

How to build vital and quality SEO Incoming Links

How to Load the Elements of Your Page with SEO Boosting Content through Titles, Formatting and Linking

Take a look today!

Introduction to SEO

2010-03-08T12:58:00.003-05:00

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the broad art and science used to provide benefit a page or web sites overall ranking in FREE Organic Search Results Pages or SERP. I said both Art and Science for a reason. Quite a bit of SEO is a science, you can produce measurable results by performing certain actions. The art come in two ways. First it is the flair with which SEO is performed and second it is an intuitive feeling as to what really tip a site over the top.

Three Key Areas or Elements of SEO:

ONPAGE - Includes the actual content with keywords and phrases, the mechanics of the page both visible (Bold, Titles, Bullets, Headings and so on) and invisible (Scripts, HTML accuracy, page speed) It may also include things like keyword density, number of words overall, graphic names, page title name and actual file name and metatags, Links both internal (to other pages on site) or out. The list goes on and on.

ONSITE - Includes decisions like web host reputation, how your site maps are handled, how errors and redirects are coded, structure and depth of the site, Age of the site, this list is not as extensive as ONPAGE, but some items will really not be in your control.

OFFSITE - This list while shortest will eventually take the bulk of the time and effort. It includes all actions taken that are not directly involved with your physical site and pages. Registering your page with search engines and building incloming links are the two primary tasks inb this category.

For more information check out a 10 Step SEO plan for Small Businesses