While a lot of businesses are realizing the benefits, many are still unsure about investing in it. With search engine marketing still a relatively new practice, many of these businesses do not have any previous experience with it and rather than embrace it, they ignore it.

For these businesses however, there are a lot of benefits that can come by simply investing a bit of time and experimenting with new practices. Below are a few ideas (mainly Google focused) to help small businesses test the water without getting in too deep:

Natural Results and SEO

The main target for any business looking to increase online visibility and drive traffic is the natural search results. These account for the majority of traffic that comes from search engines and the ones that require the most work. While there are a whole range of factors that search engines consider when ranking websites, some are more important than others. To get a better understanding of SEO there’s lots of information out there to help you. Why not check out Leora’s intro to SEO which should help you get started.

As a business owner, there are small changes you can make to your website that can have a big effect on your positions in the natural search results. In my experience, the simplest and most rewarding change any business can make for SEO is optimizing title tags. These appear in the blue browser bar at the top of the page and are one of the most important on page factors search engines consider when determining the relevance of the page. Try to keep this to around 65 characters, put the most important keywords first and include the location or brand if these are keywords you want to be targeting.

For example, the current title tag for Navaro is “SEO, Search Engine Optimisation and PPC Company Warwickshire | Navaro”. After trying various layouts, we are currently using SEO and search engine optimization as the first keywords, as they are the most difficult ones to rank for, then PPC company as the second, followed by the location and then a “|” separating the company name. The company name is displayed this way at the end of every title tag.

Google Local Business Center

If your business provides services to a location specific area, Google will often return local business results when the relevant keyword is searched for. These results are displayed above the natural results and can often drive a fair amount of traffic. Submitting to Google Local Business Center (Google Local Business Centre in Great Britain) is easy and can be done through your Google account. A few things to keep in mind when creating the listing:

• User reviews will help improve your position in local search and increase trust in your listing
• Try to use keywords in your company name
• Fill in as many details as possible to help add further weight to the listing
• The closer your company is to the center of the city the better

Examples of local business results on Google:

Google Base

With Google now trying to help users find what they are looking for as quickly as possible, products are often show directly in the search results. These are taken from Google Base, which again can be accessed through a Google account. By uploading the details of the products you are currently selling you can help penetrate the search results, even in some of the most competitive areas. See also Google Merchant Center, which you can get to from Google Base.

UK examples:

PPC Advertising

Pay per click adverts are the ones that show up to the right, above and below the natural search results (depending on the search engine). As opposed to print advertising, where you pay for the advert whether or not it reaches prospective customer, pay per click advertising only costs money when someone clicks on the advert and is delivered to your website.

This form of advertising, along with SEO is one of the most cost effective and targeted around and a simple account can be set up in around half an hour. It gives the advertiser complete control over everything from daily budget and target area, to maximum cost per click.

Testing a couple of these methods should give you an insight into the benefits that search engine marketing can have for your business.

 

Ben Hook is the owner Navaro, a Warwickshire SEO company helping clients to grow their business by increasing their online visibility.

 

Thank you, Ben, for having the honor of writing the first guest post for this blog!

the most important thing when doing search engine optimization is get a good amount of backlinks first. when you have a sufficient amount of backlinks, then you can start optimizing in page links, keyword density and other factors which affects your ranking.

And Navaro says:

internal linking is an important factor also and is worth looking into.

On another blog, a commentator felt strongly that page optimization (keywords, meta tags, body tags and more) was the most important factor.

We could argue about what is MOST important of the big three (Incoming Links, Page Optimization or Great Content). Instead, make sure to familiarize yourself with all three of these approaches and apply some of each to your site.

I would suggest that the most important place to put your energy is in building great content. If you have content worthy of a link, the links will come. Of course, there are many ways to “nudge” along the process of getting links. But if you have limited time, put some of that time into a blog for your business. This will give you an opportunity to write more valuable content that others can link to. Here are few examples of a blog for a small business:

• Jaydien Network Solutions blog
• Law Office of Donald D. Vanarelli Blog

More information about SEO, incoming links and page optimization:

• SEO 101 All You Wanted To Know About Incoming Links
• High Quality Inbound Links Can Boost Your Rankings and Site Traffic
• SEO Chat Forums
• How to Grow Your Google Authority
• 5 SEO Tips for a better keyword research process
• Organic SEO and Tracking Your Social Networks
• How We Got a Link from the New York Times
• Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization

Painting is by Lesser Ury, a German Impressionist

The default structure of a WordPress permalink is http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=1234 -not the prettiest url, nor does it have any keywords that a search engine might like.

Here’s a screenshot of how permalink choices look in WordPress Admin:

So, what to choose, what to choose. If your site does well with having dates of posts, you might want to use the Month and Date choice or the Year and Month choice that adds the post name so the link at least looks like it makes sense to a human. And the search engine can pick up any keywords in the post name.

Many SEO posts have suggested using: “%category% %post-name%” – the permalink would have the name of the category, followed by the name of the post. This sounds great for picking up keywords from a link, and the whole link is meaningful to a user. Furthermore, one doesn’t have the problem of an old date appearing in a link thus making it seem like the post is no longer relevant.

So, what is the problem with using http://example.com/category/post-name/ or http://example.com/post-name/ ? It turns out that because there is no numeric field first in the permalink, WordPress has to do a lot more behind the scenes work to look up those posts. Here is the post that first alerted me to the problem with non-numeric permalinks. Why believe that expert? Because he has the WordPress Codex page for permalinks on his side:

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.

So is this really a reason to avoid http://example.com/post-name/ ? If you go back to Scott’s post that is entitled
Many SEO Experts Give Wrong Advice Regarding WordPress Permalinks, please note these two comments:

Joost de Valk Says:
Posted: June 10th, 2009 at 2:33 pm

“The system isn’t bullet proof, but it’s being worked on, it should detect collisions like that when a post is made, and prevent them automatically, however, very few people actually have that issue.

I still think that performance is something that we should handle within WP, and not go for sub par solutions just because WP isn’t able to handle it. WP is the best optimized system out there, and I’ll fight till my last day to keep it like that”

and

graywolf Says:
Posted: June 11th, 2009 at 10:30 am

using years/month/date is silly, it makes your posts seem dated when they don’t have to.

Using WP Cache you can minimize so many of the performance issues it absolutely justifies having the KWD in the URL. Additionally if you do it “right” you can use the post title, page title URL KWD’s to capture alternate singular plural versions.

it’s your blog so do what you want but i’m going to keep on doing “wrong”

Here are two experts (see Joost’s site http://yoast.com/ and Graywolf’s blog Graywolf’s SEO Blog) that say the system may need fixing, but it is not worthwhile to have numbers in the permalink just because the technology is not yet up to par. In fact, Graywolf implies that WP Cache may minimize many of these performance problems.

Conclusion?

• If you don’t think your site is going to get really big with lots of posts, you might as well go with http://example.com/category/post-name/ or http://example.com/post-name/
• If you think dating your posts will fit in with the nature of your site, then choose a date option.
• If you really want to have http://example.com/post-name/, you can bank on the fact that few have had these problems and caching may minimize the performance issues.
• If you like to err on the side of caution and don’t want dates, you can use http://example.com/post-id/post-name/.

In general, make your choice, move forward, and keep reading!

More reading on permalink choice:

• WordPress SEO: How to Choose a Permalink Structure (discusses the issue of similar titles in permalinks)

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. If you have a website or a blog, you should care about SEO.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your web site or blog optimized for search engines. It means getting your site to show up when you do a search in Google, and getting your site to show up as high as possible relative to similar sites.

How is a site optimized? Several factors are taken into account by search engines: incoming links, code, keywords, content.

Let’s start with code. You want to make sure your site has a DOC type tag at the top. Look in your source code to see if it’s there. In Firefox, your source code is in the View menu under ‘Page Source.’ In general, you can check your code by validating the code. A great validator tool: http://validator.w3.org/

Keywords: What are users putting in search engines to find your website or blog post? For example, to find my post on Twitter chats, perhaps someone searched for “Twitter chats.” Make sure that keyword is in your <title> tag and, if you are using a meta description tag, in that tag, too. But search engines do not like duplication, so if you have multiple posts on say, Twitter chats, use different titles and descriptions for each post. Think of related keywords, such as Tweet Chats or Connecting on Twitter. A thesaurus might be able to help you come up with ideas, as might a search on Google.

Incoming Links: Who links to you? The term is called link popularity. It’s not just having any old page linking to your post or page, it’s posts with higher ranking than yours and relevant material linking to yours. If you want to find out who is linking to you, type: ‘link: yourdomainname’ into Google. For example: link: www.leoraw.com

Meta Tags and Title Tags: Once again, these are found in your source code. A title tag looks like this <title>. Meta tags related to SEO are description tags and keyword tags. You want to fill these with words that are unique to each page. Your site will be penalized if you have the same title or description throughout your site.

Navigation: Search engines need to be able to crawl your site. They can’t crawl Javascript or Flash menus. So some sites, although looking “professional,” are a bit of a disaster when it comes to search engines. Why bother putting up a website if no one can find it? If you do have fancy links that search engines can’t read, you might just need a side bar or footer with simple links for search engines to navigate.

Content: I put this last, but really, Content is King. If your content is rich, then people will want to read. Search engines love varied language. They can’t (yet) read Flash or imagery, but they can tell when text is varied and distinct. Remember that writing for the web is different than for print; keep it brief but keyword-rich.

Want more?

• The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog
• Search Engine Optimization for WordPress
• Google SEO Starter Guide
• 10 Factors determining SEO value of backlinks & How to find them with a Backlink Checker
• 5 SEO Posts You Need to Read
• Outbound Links – An Endangered Species? [And Why I Still Link Up]
• Natural Link Building : Create an Online Presence and Linkable Brand
• Approaches to SEO: Incoming Links, Page Optimization and Great Content

Questions? Suggestions? Experiences to relate on this topic?

Update: two commentators mentioned two more aspects of SEO: XML Sitemaps and Internal Linking.

Painting is by Lesser Ury, a German Impressionist