Search engine optimization (SEO) is probably one of the best tools in the arsenal of a small business owner. SEO is essentially the process of making your website relevant to the search engines so that when your target customer searches for what your business provides, your company displays in the #1 position or at least on the first page of the search engine.
It’s mostly common knowledge now but a targeted set of keywords determines where your website ranks in comparison to others in the search, sorted by relevance. Search engine optimization is commonly mistaken as just finding keywords and putting them on a page. It is much more involved than that, as you will see below.
Step-by-Step Action Plan
- Identify what keywords that someone would use to generally find your business online. Additionally, figure out 2-5 keywords per page of your site that match the services or products discussed on that page directly. An example is below:
Example Business: Flower Delivery
Example Website: www.flowersforyou.com
Example Location: Los Angeles, California
Main Keyword List:
- Flower Catering
- Flower Delivery
- Flower Deliver Company
- Wholesale Flower Delivery
- Flower Delivery Store
- Florist Delivery
- Flowers Direct
- Flowers Catering
- Floral Delivery Los Angeles
- Los Angeles Flower Delivery
- Flower Catering LA
Let’s say you had a page on your site that talked about the orchid flower. Your keywords may look like this…
Page Specific Keyword List:
- Orchid Flower
- Orchid Flower Delivery
- Orchid Flower Catering
- Orchid Flower Los Angeles
- After you’ve created your general and page specific keywords, you’ll want to implement them in the tag below which is held in the code of each page of your website:
<meta name="Keywords" content=" ">
Commonly referred to as a meta tag, this piece of code is looked to by the search engines to find out what your site is about. To see what it would like after you’ve filled in your keywords, view below:
<meta name=”Keywords” content=” Flower Catering, Flower Delivery, Flower Deliver Company, Wholesale Flower Delivery, Flower Delivery Store, Florist Delivery, Flowers Direct, Flowers Catering, Floral Delivery Los Angeles, Los Angeles Flower Delivery, Flower Catering LA“>
- Next, you want to label each of your pages with the proper description text so that when your page shows up in the search engines, people will be more likely to click on your link. The tag to insert this description is below:
<meta name="Description" content=" ">
The proper way to label this tag is below:
<meta name="Description" content=" Flowers For You is the area’s leading floral delivery shop with over 700 clients in the Metro Los Angeles area.">
- Once you have implemented your keywords and descriptions it is time to title each of your pages using the following tag:
<html lang="en"><head><title> </title>
The title tag is one of the most important components to search engine optimization. To label a page properly, there is a set format that needs to be followed:
· Always start title with a general description of your service
o Floral Delivery – Los Angeles
· Always separate description and company name with a “|”
· Corporate name always comes last
An example:
Floral Delivery – Los Angeles | Flowers For You
The proper way to label this tag is below:
<html lang="en"><head><title>Floral Delivery – Los Angeles California | Flowers For You </title>
- Last but not least, it is time to label your images! Most small business owners miss out on this opportunity because this is a more advanced SEO method. Search engines can only read text, so when they come across images and other non-text objects on your site, they overlook them and don’t count that in their relevance scores. This can be a disaster for small business owners who have image rich or flash based websites. The solution is to attach text to each image through a special tag in your website’s code so that search engines can understand what it is.
The image tag looks like this:
<img src="” border=0 alt=" "></a>
This is what it would look like if you were describing an orchid flower:
<img src="Insert link to your image here” border=0 alt=" Orchid Flower – Los Angeles"></a>
The last couple points are classified as the “onsite optimization” component of Search engine optimization. Now it’s time to get to the offsite optimization, which is arguably the most important aspect of search engine optimization
- After the onsite optimization is done, it’s now time to make sure that the search engines know your pages exist. The way to do this is through getting your pages indexed. Indexing happens by you creating an XML sitemap and submitting that sitemap to each of the search engines. The process to do this is below.
For Google:
- Visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
- Enter your domain name and start the generator
- You will get an email stating how to get access to the map
- Download the map
- Visit Google Webmaster Tools
- Create an account
- Follow instructions to add a website
- Implement the code on your site and verify
- Click your website name in Webmaster Tools dashboard
- Click “Site Configuration” and “Sitemaps”
- Click “Submit a Sitemap” and you’re good to go!
You can do the same for each of the search engines and the process is fairly similar.
- Last but not least and probably the MOST important component of off site optimization is link building. Our entire course shows you how to get your business’s marketing message on the Internet. One thing we don’t cover (except for here) is why certain links are better than others. Examples are below:
Example Links that you want:
Best Flower Shop in Los Angeles
Example links that are still good but not optimized:
The difference between the two types of links is that the latter, leads with the name of your business through the description of the link and also the domain name. Search engines want to know the generic description of where the link is going. The reason for this is because, that is how most people search, not by company name but by service or product they are looking for.
Demographics
Yahoo
Bing (MSN)
Ask Jeeves
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate from organic visitors (from SEO) is typically higher than marketing tactics and in some cases even higher than classifieds. You can see conversion rates as high as 10% – 12%.
Cost
If you do all of this yourself, you incur virtually no costs!
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SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from …
Hey Donny, I think it is so great that you are giving such detailed instructions on what to do for SEO Optimization. I am definitely going to have to come back to this post when it is not so late and see if I can wrap my brain around it. I really want to understand more of this SEO stuff and am so glad that you do.
Can't wait to read some more of your tips!