For many small businesses just starting out, their primary startup preoccupations would include getting their website up and running. Although they realize the massive sales potential of their online presence but it will remain limited if small business SEO is not employed.
With search engine optimization, your business can gain website traffic both from visits and walk-in traffic from customers, as well as help make your site more popular and reach out to your target customers online.
If you are still having some budget issues that using an SEO company may seem impossible this very moment yet you want to know some ways to use in improving your online presence and ensuring the practices you adopt are sustainable, we have here a few SEO tips to get you started:
Quality Content
With the recent panda algorithm update, Google targets poor quality content. In effect, the search engine gives high quality content higher rank in its search pages. Again, the argument content is king is vindicated and good thing for businesses to realize the quality content is the key to sustainable success. Users are likely to bounce off when their expectations for quality content are not met after searching for results.
Metrics that search engines use when ranking pages in SERPS have also changed. Search engines look for social signals, which means they give more weight to a particular piece of content showing many likes or followerships. Other metrics search engines take into account are: bounce rate, visits and links to the page.
With tight budget, you can start focusing on quality content and researching what questions customers are searching for. With that information, you can start providing content that meets quality standards and answers these questions. Voila, you already have the foundation of your content marketing strategy.
Building Quality Links
Links are important to search engine ranking. With the penguin update targeting low quality links and over optimization, those not following Google's strict policy on link networking are bound to suffer from being penalized. Building quality links can be achieved through the use blogger outreach. Link building tactics that are no longer effective include directory submissions, low quality link networks, social book marks, and article submissions.
Blogger network is the more legitimate small business SEO that you can employ because the focus is on building relationships with other blog owners. Through such network, which are trusted, website owners can pitch content ideas for possible inclusion to the network. As a result, blog owners get content that is not only of good quality but free in exchange for a quality link back. The links are counted as votes by search engines, impressing that the pages are important and popular. Also an important tactic is link variation which ensures that a website's link profile will appear natural.
These are only two essential small business SEO practices – producing quality content and building quality links – that you can employ to have your business rank within search engine platforms. Other strategies are important like on-page optimization and social signals. But prioritizing the foundations of sustaining your SEO efforts through quality content and building quality links, your survival rate on the next round of algorithm updates now look sustainable.