Why a Small Business Website Needs SEO

Why a Small Business Website Needs SEO
By Brett M Howard

So you're on the fast track to business success. You've just created a business website and you can't wait to make that first online sale. Your website is perfect in your opinion and it couldn't be more colorful and full of images. It's a sure thing your sales will rapidly increase! A few months pass by and you're still waiting. Why aren't people visiting my website and why haven't we had as much as a sniff at a sale? While there could be many reasons surrounding this problem, one of the most common is lack of SEO.

Search Engine Optimization makes it easier for search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, to locate, categorize, index and rank web content. It's not uncommon for small business owners to establish a website but not establish a web presence. Put it this way, if your website content is not optimized it's comparable to having a billboard on a dessert island. It's there but no one is looking! It's important to provide excellent, optimized content to get noticed.

If you are involved in inbound marketing or have an inbound marketing consultant helping you with your online marketing, chances are SEO has been employed. If you're a small business owner handling your internet marketing and are unfamiliar with SEO, listen up because it's important you understand why you need SEO.

It would take a very long time to present the overall benefits and SEO tactics since they are changing constantly. We'll give you a brief overview of why it's important and some simple strategies you can use to help your efforts. It's important to first establish some keywords you would like your website to focus on that encompass your business. What words are most relevant? A good source to help you with this would be AdWords.Google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. To give you an example, say your website is based on classic cars. When you type in "classic cars" into the keyword box it returns a number of related keywords. Not only does it return related keywords but it will provide how often these keywords are searched. This is a very beneficial tool to help you determine the keywords you want your content to be focused around and be sure your updating your content frequently and check back with this tool to stay search current.

Another integral part of your website, that may be missing, is using keywords in your Title Tags, Heading, Paragraph titles, Meta description tag and Alt image to name a few. All of these can be updated if you have access to your website's control panel. Now if you use WordPress you can download an SEO pack to make this even easier. If you're not quite sure if these parts have been optimized, look at the very top blue bar, this is your Title tag. If your Title tag is not keyword rich and does not give a description of your website, there's a good possibility your website has not be optimized. To use your Title tag as an example, it needs to be 8-10 words and focus on 1-2 keyword phrases. Each page on your website should have a unique Title tag.

Another easy way to increase your SEO efforts is to use links to build traffic. If you're putting out unique content through social media marketing or just commenting on industry related blogs, you can create links back to your website. If you want to get fancy, you can always search down authoritative or relevant websites and ask for a link exchange. You put their link on your website and vice versa. If not, look to write articles with keyword rich content and use embedded links in the article that will link back to relevant material on your website. There are many ways to approach this involving inbound marketing so it's just another simple way to get link traffic.

Some other beneficial ways would be submitting your website to free and paid directories, job listings, press releases, social media accounts, social book marking and even through affiliate programs. The fact is even if you are not tech savvy there are ways to improve your website's SEO. The first step should always go back to researching keywords and knowing how to use these words or phrases. Small business marketing will need to have some form of SEO makeover to make the site relevant and noticed online. It does require some time and patience, trial and error, but the end result will be very beneficial.

Inbound Promotions helps your business stay current in social media, website relevance, blogging and many other forms of inbound marketing. We will help your small business create informative content to attract readers and customers. We help small business owners promote their business via social media, blogs, link building and internet marketing that will get results.

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