Search Engine Optimization

Have you just launched a new website for your small business? If so, be aware that the old adage, “If you build it, they will come,” does not apply to websites. If you want more potential customers to find your website, you’ll need to complete some basic SEO tasks in order for it to appear in the search engine results more quickly.

It doesn’t matter how fantastic your website is; if people can’t find it, it won’t make any difference to your bottom line. Regardless of what industry you’re in, here are 5 easy SEO tips that you can implement right away to improve your new website’s search engine visibility and keep track of user behavior in order to make ongoing improvements to your site.

1. Install Google Analytics

Start tracking your website visitors right away by installing Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool that is very easy to install and provides you with tons of information about your website visitors and their usage patterns. You can perfect your website’s sales funnel by using your analytics program to track actions on your site, such as contact form submissions, downloads, and purchases.

2. Set up Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools are free and useful for any webmaster who wants to know how their website is performing in Google. Google Webmaster Tools provide key information about how Google indexes your site, insight into anchor text links on your site, information about the interlinking of your site’s pages, and much more.

3. Submit an XML Sitemap

Submit an XML sitemap to the major search engines once your website is complete to get your website crawled faster and ensure that the search engines crawl all of the pages of your website, including deeper pages that are harder to find. You can submit your XML sitemap to each search engine directly from Google Webmaster Tools.

4. Set up a Local Business Listing

Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have business directories that allow you to add a free local business listing. Setting up a local business listing is beneficial because it increases the chances that your website will show up in the search results when users type in local search queries. Anytime users type in local search queries, the local business listings typically show up before all other search engine results. This makes it much easier for small, local businesses to compete with large companies, which dominate the search engine results for competitive keyword phrases with their high powered SEO campaigns.

5. Start a Blog

Your site will appear less on the search engines if it is static and seldom updated. You can dramatically increase the chances of your website showing up when users search for relevant search queries by adding a blog to your site. Search engines love websites that frequently publish fresh, unique content, and having a blog gives you the opportunity to do just that. As an added benefit, blogging can be an excellent way for you to interact with your current and future customers. A blog also increases your business’s authority in its respective industry.

These might seem like simple tasks, but it’s shocking how many small business owners ignore this advice. You’ll be several steps ahead of your competitors if you implement these basic SEO tasks. Just be aware that this list only includes a few techniques for increasing traffic to your website and improving your site’s SEO. Stay tuned and we’ll share additional on-page and off-page SEO techniques that will help you build a strong presence in the search engine results in no time.

When people build links to their website, they tend to prioritize links to the home page and fail to link to other pages deeper within their website.  And while backlinks that point to the homepage continue to be important, it’s better if all of the pages on your website rank well for target keywords.

Building backlinks to each individual page of your website is known as deep linking.  Deep linking helps you drive more traffic to your site from the search engines.  Plus, it makes your site more user-friendly because it drives searchers to pages of your site that are highly relevant to their search queries.  After all, most people find it frustrating when they search for something and then are led to a homepage that’s only slightly related to their search query.  Many search engine users will even click away if they land on a generic homepage that requires them to find the information they seek by themselves.

Getting started with deep linking is simple.  Rather than building backlinks that point to your site’s homepage, link to the most relevant page of your site every time you have a new link-building opportunity.  Here are some practical deep linking tips that you can implement straightaway:

Directory Submission

Submit your website to directories that allow you to link to internal pages of your site and use keyword-rich anchor text.

Guest Posting

Submit guest posts to influential blogs in your niche that allow keyword-rich dofollow links.  Some bloggers may only allow you to link back to your homepage, so you might have to ask around to find an appropriate blog.

Forum Signatures

If you’re active in any forums, change the backlinks in your forum signatures often so that the pages you link to are relevant to the content of the particular forum threads you post on.

Article Submission

When you write articles to submit to article directories, at the end of the articles, link back to pages of your website that are relevant to the article topics instead of linking back to your homepage.

Blog Commenting

Blogs that use the Comment Luv plug-in provide you with traffic and link juice, if the links are dofollow.  Anytime you comment on a blog with the Comment Luv plug-in, your comment is posted along with a backlink to your latest post or to another post of your choice.  So, if you comment on blogs in your industry on a regular basis, look for ones that use the Comment Luv plug-in to maximize the benefits of your blog commenting efforts.

Internal Linking

When you link internally, using the right keywords, it will improve your website’s deep linking structure.  Internal linking can be done manually, or if you have a blog, automatically with plug-ins like “related posts” and “popular posts.”

Link Exchanges

Exchange links with another site owner in your niche, but keep in mind that the search engines value one-way links the most.  For the best results, link to a page of their site from a relevant page of your site and have them link to and from different pages so that the links are considered one-way links by the search engines.

Networking

Try to network with bloggers who link out often to other content producers.  For example, many popular bloggers create link love posts and link to different articles and blog posts in their industry.  Get buddy-buddy with these bloggers and eventually ask them nicely to link to your content.  You can offer to do them a favor in return.

Social media marketing is an important part of SEO’s future.  Although the ROI of social media marketing is not as straightforward as the ROI you get from say, PPC ads or banner advertising, it’s becoming an important component of SEO campaigns.  At first glance, SEO and social media might seem unrelated, but after a bit of exploration and experimentation, you’ll quickly realize that social media (blogging, social networking, social bookmarking, etc.) can significantly enhance your SEO campaign.  Here are the top 10 reasons why social media marketing supports SEO.

1. Increases your visibility

When the content you submit to social voting and bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious becomes popular, it attracts the attention of the so-called linkerati.  The linkerati are influential bloggers and journalists who pretty much determine what content will spread on the social web.  And a backlink from one of the linkerati is pretty much a guaranteed way for your content to go viral online and get tons and tons of links from a variety of sources.  You could think of it as link-building on steroids.

2. Search engines are catching on

Search engine bots are getting smarter.  They’re quickly learning to value certain links more than others, so it’s safe to say that eventually, organic, editorial links will reign supreme.  Traditional SEO won’t go anywhere anytime soon, but you’ll be able to maintain better search engine visibility if you’re also involved in social networks and attract links organically.

3. Helps you increase online authority

When people link to your content and there is buzz surrounding your brand on the social web, it increases your brand’s authority.  People pay more attention to what you have to say and value your contributions more when you’re popular in social media.  Simply put, a social media presence could do wonders for your online PR campaign.

4. Increases opportunities for internal linking

When you have a blog on your company website, you can add contextual links to your blog posts that point to key pages of your site.  These links can include keyword-rich anchor text.

5. Helps you build relationships with influential bloggers and webmasters

When you use social networking sites like Twitter, it allows you to build relationships with influential bloggers and webmasters, who will be more likely to link back to your website if you engage with them first.  It’s far more effective than sending cold link request emails to strangers.

6. Secures top search engine rankings for your brand name

When you create profiles on several major social media websites, such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, it allows you to secure slots on the top page of search engine rankings for your brand name.  None of your competitors will be able to take advantage of any of that branded search traffic if you manage your online reputation wisely by building a strong presence across various social networks.

7. Provides an endless source of ideas for content creation

In order for a website’s SEO campaign to remain effective, the website must constantly publish fresh, new content.  When you build a community around your website via social media, you have access to an endless source of ideas and inspiration for content creation.

8. Optimizes your website for long-tail keywords

The more content there is on your site, the more you are going to get traffic from the search engines.  You’ll even notice your site getting search engine traffic for a variety of long-tail keywords that you didn’t deliberately target.

9. Helps you get links on an almost daily basis

When you publish content on your blog every week, you start to build an audience of subscribers.  These subscribers are likely to link to your content nearly every day.  On the other hand, if you only have static content on your website and aren’t involved in social networking, you will constantly have to put an effort into link-building since you probably won’t be able to get many links organically.

10. Search engines reward websites that publish new content frequently

Search engine bots love frequently updated sites and visit them often.  If you keep up a regular publishing schedule for a while, the search engines will start indexing your content just a few hours after it’s published.

There’s no doubt it: social media marketing feeds your SEO efforts.  If you develop both a social media marketing strategy and an SEO strategy for your website, you’ll find that the efforts complement each other, helping you steadily increase your online marketing campaign’s overall ROI.

Social bookmarking refers to posting links to your website content on websites that store, organize, and manage bookmarks, such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Propeller.    Some claim that social bookmarking helps you achieve high search engine rankings in a short amount of time, but is it really worth it?

To put it simply, yes.  Social bookmarking is worthwhile because it increases the number of backlinks to your website.  Link building is one of the most important SEO techniques out there, and for keywords with moderate to low competition, social bookmarking can quickly improve your website’s search engine rankings.  To ensure that your social bookmarking efforts actually complement your link building strategy, use only social bookmarking sites with the dofollow attribute.

Another benefit of social bookmarking is that it widens your audience.  Social bookmarking allows you to publicize your website’s content in order to attract more readers.  If your content is well received, you could get more bookmarks from other users, and ultimately, more links.  If your website or article gets bookmarked many times and reaches the top page of a bookmarking website, it could bring hordes of traffic to your website.

Generally speaking, the traffic that you get from social bookmarking websites isn’t high quality.  Users of social bookmarking sites usually click on the links, take a quick look at the content, and then leave.  But their bookmarks make a difference because they give your website more authority in other people’s eyes and help you build a larger following.  The more people there are who know about your site, the more likely you are to receive visits to your website from potential customers.

Tips for Maximizing Your Social Bookmarking Efforts

Make sure you insert a link to your sales page or product page in your content.  While it’s essential to write great content in order to promote your website on social bookmarking sites, if your ultimate goal is to get more customers and sales, you should casually link back to your sales page in your article, as well.  Don’t submit content to social bookmarking sites that is a blatant sales pitch, but don’t create good content just for the sake of creating good content, either.  Your content should serve a higher purpose.  If you include a link back to your sales page or product page, potential customers who are interested in what you have to offer will click through.

To make your social bookmarks easier to find and to help them rank better for target keywords, make sure that you add relevant keywords and keyword phrases to the bookmarks in the form of tags.  Some social bookmarking sites allow you to include an unlimited number of tags.

You can make it even easier for people to share your content on social bookmarking sites by adding share buttons to your content.  If you use a blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger on your website, you can upload a plug-in that adds share graphics to your website.  All that your readers have to do is click on an icon in order to bookmark your article or blog post on a social bookmarking site.

Just be cautious about bookmarking your content excessively on social bookmarking sites.  Spamming bookmarking sites could lead your site to get penalized by the search engines, which would defeat the whole purpose of your bookmarking campaign!