Running a small business can be tough. You’re probably an expert in a single niche, whether that’s flower arranging, car repair, catering or something else, but owning a business seems to require you to master so many other areas, from accounting to law and more – like, for example, SEO.
Fortunately, you can hire professionals in most cases. However, this can get expensive, and you might want to try to do some parts yourself. If you want to work on your business website’s search engine marketing, it might be worth hiring a professional for a few hours here and there to help you with SEO marketing, but there is also a lot you can do on your own by understanding a few basic elements.
Understand Meta Tags
If your position is that you don’t want to think about technical things, then your eyes might start to glaze over at the phrase meta tags, but this useful concept is also easy to understand. This is simply the information you see about a web page when you search online. The meta title is the title the searcher sees and the meta description is the web page description. These should be engaging and enticing along with being informative to encourage the user to click through.
Pay Attention to Content
Content is king when it comes to driving traffic to your site. Some elements of good content are linked more to other marketing concerns than SEO, such as ensuring that it is engaging and grammatically correct. However, there are several SEO-specific content guidelines you should also keep in mind. First, each page should have at least a couple hundred words of copy on it. Next, you should use headers as appropriate. This should include at least an H1 tag, which might be identical your meta title. You can also use additional headers to break up the text. Finally, be judicious in your use of keywords.
If keyword stuffing was ever the way to go, this is no longer the case. Not only are search engines increasingly wary of this approach, but if you’ve ever visited a cooking blog and wondered why you had to scroll through a dozen paragraphs that kept reusing phrases like “best chocolate cake” just to get to the chocolate cake recipe you needed, you know how frustrating this can be for the user. By comparison, a website for an online lender might want to attract people who want to take out private student loans. Phrases such as “money for college,” “low interest rates” and, of course, “private student loans” fit naturally into headers and text copy and can help students searching for these things find their way to the site.
Tidy Up Your Web Page
Sites that are organized in a logical way tend to get higher search engine rankings. Subpages should be logically linked under their main topics. The problem is that over time, as new things are added, the site starts to get messy. Dead links can actually hurt your search engine rankings as can bits of old SEO that are based on outdated approaches to ranking.
If your site is not up to date, both search engines and potential customers may assume it is simply a spam site.
