Matt Taylor
SEO, Internet Marketing, and other things I don't know much about…
SEO for Small Business
Oct 22nd
A question I’ve had a few times is whether SEO is worth doing for small businesses. The short answer is yes, although the strategies you will employ will differ from an e-commerce, or advertising orientated website. Generally a small-business website should be easier to SEO, but the targeting becomes very important. Every website should be optimised for the search engines, as even if it drives minimal traffic, it can increase profile and credibility.
While traffic for certain small businesses from the SERP’s may be small, conversion rates tend to be quite a bit higher than for more highly traffic keywords. For example, people searching for “hair salon Lane Cove” more than likely are looking for a hair salon where then can get a haircut sooner rather than later.
Select Your Keywords Carefully
The keywords you choose to optimise for are very important for small business. Generally, the users searching for more niche search terms are searching for very specific sites, and even if you rank for the term you will more than likely be skipped as users search for the specific results.
Brainstorm what you would search for if you were a prospective client searching for your business. For Green’s on Blenheim some keywords might be:
- “Green’s on Blenheim”
- “pizza North Ryde”
- “pizza Ryde”
- “North Ryde takeaway”
Your list should be longer than this. Once you have completed your list have a look at what ranks at the moment. Do they obviously use SEO? What are their titles? Where do they get their links from? Don’t forget to use Google’s Keyword Tool to find some good keywords…
I would recommend trying to rank for industry and geographic location (i.e. “pizza North Ryde” or “plumber Dubbo”), as this would result in a high level of conversions.
Keep the On-Site SEO Simple and Targetted
Obviously, as a business website, your site’s content can’t be 100% customised for SEO purposes. This need not affect rankings, since Google rewards totally unique content (which yours should be!)
- Make sure you have the main keywords in your titles once
- Do this for each page of your website so they all rank
- Ensure your site is easy to navigate
- Have a simple HTML navigation structure that is easy to use for users and for search engine spiders
- Don’t be too fancy
- Google can’t read Flash (for now), so best to keep to HTML as that is the best for SEO
Customise Your Off-Site
I would never deny the importance of links in SEO, but for small business SEO it is a lot more efficient and effective to customise your link gathering. Generally, competition will be lower for the keywords you have selected, thus a wide-ranging and all-encompassing link building campaign, while it may have it’s benefits, will be superfluous. Here’s a few tips for good off-site small business optimisation:
- Submit to all the relevant directories
- Yahoo Local and Google Local are perfect examples. A submission to Google Local can often result in an appearance above the search results in Google.
- Submit to industry relevant directories
- Try to gather links from sites that would genuinely link to you. That might be clients, suppliers, or even competition!
- Create and submit a Google sitemap using Google’s Webmaster Tools.
- Would it be worth creating a Twitter or Facebook account for your business? Often the answer is ‘no’, but if you think you have something interesting and relevant to share of actual value then this is a great way of gathering links and increasing profile.
Tracking and Maintenance
As I said in earlier posts, the importance of using Google Analytics effectively cannot be stressed enough. By monitoring traffic flow daily, and finding where it came from will allow you to fine-tune your SEO over time.
Also monitor how your site goes in the SERP’s. Track the results weekly to see what you begin to rank for, and what is dragging the chain. This way you will learn what deserve attention and focus, and what can be left by the wayside.
Using Twitter for SEO
Oct 15th
As much of a computer nerd as I may be, I avoided using Twitter for quite a while, and only started using it properly about three months ago. At first I didn’t see much point to a “micro-blogging” service, but the more I use it the more I’m beginning to understand why it’s used, and in turn how it can be used for SEO purposes.
Admittedly, any link posted on Twitter appears as “nofollow” and thus isn’t much good for passing any link juice or PageRank. However, we do know that Google still crawls “nofollow” links (doesn’t make much sense, does it) and so your links will still get followed and thus any updates you make to your website will get cached quicker. The main benefit is not SEO though, it is to drive direct traffic and increase credibility.
It would also seem that Google has an infatuation with Twitter, and Tweets tend to show up reasonably quickly in the SERP’s. There are a few tips when using Twitter that may help you out if you are Tweeting for SEO purposes:
Pick a Good Username
Your username will also become your Twitter URL (i.e. www.Twitter.com/mjwtaylor) so try and make it either something to do with your name or your business name. This will help your rankings in Google and ensure people know exactly what they have found when they come across your account. It will also ensure your account is found easily when searched for through Twitter itself.
Write an Effective Bio
Ensure you put in any critical information, keywords or key phrases in your bio as this is the most important part of your Twitter account and will be the core content Google sees. It also tells the reader what you are about and what they can expect to find in your Tweets.
Tweet About Things That Interest You
This might seem obvious, but make sure you don’t just Tweet about your website. Otherwise people won’t see any value in your Tweets. Sure if you have something on your site you want to promote, then post about it, but make sure you post about other things as well.
Tweet Regularly, but Not Too Regularly
Don’t overdo your Tweets. People will lose interest if you are Tweeting dozens of times everyday. At the same time, people will forget about you if you only post once a month. I like posting once a day or so, but in saying that, if you have something interesting to share then by all means share it!
Begin Your Tweet with Keywords
Google tends to take into account approximately the first 40 characters from a Tweet for SEO purposes (as it also shows “Twitter” and your username before showing the tweet itself, so don’t have a stupidly long username!). Make sure in this 42 characters you have included the keyword or key phrase (but in a way that makes sense).
Include Your Keyword
Be sure to include your keyword at least once in your Tweet, preferably more but not in a spammy way. Try to include “buzz words” if possible, which should get you some traffic through people searching for the “buzz” terms.
Shorten Your URL!
Most links from Twitter tend to be deep links which have a huge amount of characters in them. You don’t have the characters to waste in Twitter, so try using one of the many URL shorteners out there. My preference is a new service called Twilitics. It’s simple, easy to use and provides you with a simple tracking mechanism showing how many times your link has been clicked. Bit.ly is also a useful service.
Spread the Word
Make sure people know about your Twitter account. You can do this by adding your Twitter URL to your email signature, adding it to your website, or spreading it on your forum signatures.
Give it Some Link Love
Twitter accounts need link love too! Where possible send a couple of links pointing to your Twitter account to ensure Google finds it. The same theory applies to Twitter accounts as it does to normal websites: the better the quality of links you get to it, the better it will rank…
As always, if you have any questions leave me a comment and the same goes for if you think I have left out something important.
WordPress SEO Tips
Oct 13th
Since WordPress is so popular nowadays, I thought it’s more than worthwhile writing a post about some SEO tips specifically pertaining to the CMS. WordPress is such a useful management system I would recommend it for just about any website, not just a blog. For instance, take a look at KODA, this website I made using WordPress while still retaining a traditional website’s look and feel. Onto my WordPress SEO tips:
Changing URL Structure
This is one of the easiest and most effective SEO changes you can make in WordPress. To make your subpages appear with the best URL structure (check out my Basic SEO Tips for URL structure tips), you will need to change the permalinks. To do this navigate to your WordPress dashboard, click “Settings”, then “Permalinks”. You will then want to select “Custom Structure” and insert “/%postname%/” in the text box (minus the inverted commas). This then makes the URL blog.com/the-post-name.
Easy Titles, Descriptions etc.
As I said in a previous post, your websites title is arguably the most important SEO feature of the whole site. The description on the other hand has now tangible SEO benefit, but will certainly help drive traffic as a good description will entice searchers to check your site out. This can be managed incredibly easily on WordPress by installing a plugin called “All-in-One SEO” (just search for that in “Plugins”). This let’s you manage lots of things that would otherwise be difficult to access on a WordPress site…
Add a Google Sitemap
Since it’s so easy to add posts and pages to a WordPress site, you often end up with an endless labyrinth of subpages and directories which are almost impossible for the search engines to crawl. By adding an XML sitemap and submitting this to Google, it ensures all your pages get crawled and begin ranking. The easiest way to do this is by getting the “XML-Sitemap” plugin for WordPress which creates a sitemap automatically and submits it to the search engines. It is also worth signing up for Google’s Webmaster Tools to track your site’s sitemap and check which of your pages have been crawled etc.
Internal Linking
As I mentioned previously, your WordPress site will no doubt end up with a heap of pages on it after only a couple of months. This means there should be ample opportunity to link one post to another (like I have done in this post). Be sure to use solid anchor text, preferably the page’s title or the keyword you are targeting (ideally these would be one and the same).
Tracking
Since Google Analytic’s can be a bit difficult to install properly on WordPress (give it a go though, as it is well worth it) you may have to look elsewhere for tracking software. A favourite of mine is the “Wassup” plugin (just search for it in “Plugins” and click “Install”). It is very Analytics-esque, and will show you exactly what people searched for to find your site or who referred them. By having this information it allows you to show what posts are the most visited and what is worth posting about more often.
If I have missed anything out or you want to add something please leave me a comment!
