The one thing that all businesses are concerned about, is getting traffic to their site – preferably targetted traffic, that is visitors that are interested in what the site owner is selling and will, eventually, make a purchase.
There is a lot of hype around how website owners can get hundreds and thousands of visitors to their site and how they can get their site on Page 1 of the Search Engines – yes, a lot of it is hype and some of it is true.
There are a couple of excellent ways for Small Business Owners to gain targetted traffic to their site including:
- Pay Per Click Marketing (Google AdWords)
- Search Engine Optimization – so your business can be found in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
- Social Marketing
- Offline advertising
Out of all of these, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the one method that site owners should have a basic understanding of, because it’s the one method that is ongoing and, in my opinion, most beneficial.
Search Engine Optimization is literally about having your website listed in the SERPs (indexed) for the search terms you want to be found for. SEO is also about having your site found as high as possible in the Search Engine rankings for those keywords – preferably on Page 1.
However, SEO is an ongoing process – once you’ve got your site listed, it takes ongoing work to improve the ranking of your site, and then maintain it.
Whilst a lot of the SEO work can be outsourced, it pays to understand the SEO Basics and why they need to be done – that way, business owners will understand whether they are getting a fair price and whether the work being offered by SEO companies is the right type of work.
My one single tip to ensuring that website are indexed, and start ranking for their chosen keywords is to write great content. Don’t be fooled by the stories that you can get your site ranked with a little bit of content – whilst you may get your site listed and ranking well for a while, it will most likely be temporary. Writing great content is the way to ensure you maintain and improve your rankings.
When you write your content, use one of your chosen keywords throughout that content – but no more than 1 to 2 times in every 100 words to avoid ‘keyword stuffing’. Once you’ve written your content, read it aloud before publishing it to make sure it sounds natural.
My final advice with this tip, is to use formatting like bold, italics and underlines to highlight your keywords and bring attention to them.
This tip is only one part of a series steps to optimizing your website for Search Engines, but I consider it one of the most important parts to the process.
I have created a simple report (and email series) where I share my 11 Steps To SEO that I use when setting up a clients site. You can obtain a copy of Get Ranked: 11 Steps To Search Engine Optimization here. However, I’m going to share one tip with you here.
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