Brad The best way to increase business and more importantly, profit margins is by increase your business’s exposure. This is a basic fundamental of advertising and marketing. Why else do you think certain ad space is more expensive than others in your daily newspaper? Now that more consumers are moving online to do their shopping, it is only natural that your business’s website finds a way to increase its exposure.
One way to do this is by optimizing correctly that it can be found within the top results on search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Here are five of the most common, yet most important steps in an small business SEO campaign:
Link building is essential
The best way to think of inbound links to a website is as votes of confidence in your content. The more people link to your website, the better it will rank in the search engine results pages. A reputable search engine optimization company knows how and where to find high quality links the search engines specifically look for.
It’s important to keep those links coming in
Now that you’ve achieved first page rankings for some of your more profitable keywords, the last think you want to do is stop link building all together. There will always be competition with their own SEO campaign looking for their own high search engine rankings. Link building is an ongoing activity.
There are different link types
Search engines look at a number of factors when factoring links into their algorithm. They look at the relevance of the links and the types of websites they are from, for example. A link from a popular website with a high Pagerank and many inbound links rate more than a link from an unpopular and possibly unreputable website.
Duplicate content is never a good thing
Search engines only list one version of content within their search results. The reason for this is that Google and Yahoo prefer to return as many different results and choices as possible within their results.
Anchor text and keywords play a huge role
It’s very important to your SEO campaign that the right keywords are chosen to optimize. Short-tail keywords, while very popular and have the most traffic are extremely difficult to rank for in some verticals. Long-tail keywords are much easier to rank for but are often so specific that search traffic for them is extremely low. Try to target a range of keywords with a high search volume but also can lead to sales.
The principle of search engine optimization is not difficult. However, it does require a lot of hard work and dedication to your link building efforts. As long as you have a basic understanding of search engine marketing concepts, it’s easier to attain first page rankings a healthy mix of high traffic keywords.
