Top Ten SEO Tips For Small Businesses: Part One

December 16, 2009

A while ago, I posted a blog post called Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid. This was a popular post, so I thought I’d create a reverse post on the top ten activities you should be doing. These are all quite generic and broad – but they should all be part of your online marketing plan if you want to boost your website traffic; and importantly – boost the relevant traffic coming to your site. Part Two of this post which includes tips 6-10 will be posted next week!

1. Research your keywords. Make sure that you know what people type into Google and the other search engines when looking for your products or services. Research into how competitive these phrases are – are there any phrases that are relevant, but aren’t quite so competitive? These are more likely to give you the results you want. Also think about plurals and synonyms.

2. Make sure each single page on your site has a unique title tag. If you’ve done your keyword research, you should also aim to use keyword/phrases in the title tag too.

3. Additionally, make sure that all the meta descriptions for each page are unique too. Since the search engines mostly show the title and description of a page in the search results, make sure your descriptions correlates to your title, includes keywords, and has some kind of call to action that persuades the searcher to click on your link rather than the result above or below you.

4. Using your keywords and phrases, look at the headers within your pages. Headers tags are like the headlines of a newspaper – your H1 header should contain your primary keyphrases, with any H2 headers containing your secondary phrases.

5. Look at your copy- does this contain keyphrases? Make sure you don’t keyword stuff your copy though – aim for about a 3% ratio of keywords to copy. The content of your site should be written with your visitors in mind first, SEO second, so make sure it still makes sense and adds value.

Search engine optimisation is something that all business owners with a website need to be aware of. If you’ve got a site and want to drive relevant traffic to that site, you need to know what to do to help the search engines get a good understanding of your business, so they can rank it for the terms you feel are most suitable for visitors. It’s not about tricking the search engines, or trying to boost traffic numbers in general. You need to see an increase in relevant traffic to you site (10 relevant visitors are far better than 1000 non relevant visitors, who leave your site straight away), and Google wants to provide searchers with a list of high quality sites, relevant to their search query. 

Come back next week for the second part of this blog post – tips six to ten are all little gems that you need to know about!

If you can’t wait until next week, get in touch with us today!

Filed under: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)