Using SEO on your business website
All businesses should have a website.
HOWEVER...
The presentation of your website helps to ensure that you get the work. And it helps to prove credibility, ability, show what you are good at, give your opinions, examine the way you approach business and more.
So knowing how to use SEO is a good idea.
Why? Well, because if you’re going to have a website, you may as well make it work for you. And if you keep plugging away at your website and blogging, there will come a time where the SEO will pay off. And the better you are at SEO, the bigger the pay off will be.
Now, if you really want to get your hands dirty and get to know SEO, I suggest Kate Toon’s Recipe for SEO Success course. But if you want to know the basics, read on.
SEO IN A MODERN WORLD
Business owners need to be more involved in their SEO than previously expected. Gone are the days where copy gets written and the rankings roll in.
There are two parts to optimizing your website for search engines – on-page factors and off-page factors. On-page relates to your web pages; off-page relates to other sites linking to you.
Today, we're taking a dive into on-page SEO.
Here is a little clarification on search engine optimization (SEO).
It’s getting increasingly hard to manipulate search engine results as Google continually updates its algorithm in order to stay a step ahead of spammers and junk marketing suppliers, as well as to best service their customers. I.E. people who are searching.
SEO is a long-term strategy that needs to be done regularly over time. Rankings take time. Resist all temptation to go for any ‘quick fixes’ offering you top rankings. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s highly likely that the supplier is using ‘black hat’ techniques which can have your site penalized by Google.
Think about SEO as ‘inbound marketing’ which means, activities that result in people searching you out.
For the best SEO results, you need to:
Name images and banners appropriately
This means including the keywords for the specific page plus name of the company in the naming of the file and making use of the alt descriptions.
For example, your homepage logo would need to be-
Your company name - logo.jpeg as a minimum
On a particularly page (such as your bio), a photo of you in action would be:
Your name – Your company name.jpeg
With an alt description of:
Name from Company name provides freelance services such as XYZ
An approach like this not only gives you the ability to rank well in Image and Video search via Google, it gives you a competitive advantage against other companies and freelancers in the same field via standard search. The reason being, most businesses neglect visual SEO.
ON-PAGE RECOMMENDATIONS – SUMMARY
Have a crawl friendly site
Keeping your site as well maintained as possible is vital to your SEO success. This means including an XML sitemap within the site itself and a functioning robot.txt. This map helps the search engine quickly skip and jump from each page without interruption so your information is presented to the person searching quickly and without error.
This is your developer’s responsibility, but make sure they supply it! If you find you don’t have these elements and you are on Wordpress, check out the plugins.
Fix broken links
Broken links can stop Google and other search engines from being able to search your site properly as well as confusing or disappointing customers. I recommend you schedule a regular overview of your site for every 3 to 6 months or use an automatic notification tool that notifies of links breaking.
Create more content
Search engines prefer new content – they will serve pages that are more recent over pages that are older, all other factors being equal. Blogging is the best and easiest way to do this. Blogs get 55% more web traffic and 70% more leads than those that don’t (Source: SEO Moz).
Blogging is a great way to reach your target audience with useful, educational information, while being invaluable for your search engine ranking in the process. Use the keywords you identify via the Google Keyword Tool as the base of your blogging experience to reinforce your position of authority.
Write with the reader in mind
Making your page and post content easy to read is vital to your websites success. It also helps the search bots read your content and choose the phrases to focus on. With that in mind, it’s a great idea to include bold and italic for key phrases and important points you wish to highlight.
You should also break down your page content with headers so people can skip to the information they need. Experiment with using bullet points and break out boxes to highlight salient points and actions you want your customer to take. This is especially important for pages where your potential customers are clicking through to find finer detail. These areas should be more about education than beauty.
Pretty doesn’t pay the rent
Some of the ugliest sites in the world have the highest traffic figures. And some of the most beautiful close down due to a lack of traffic. You must give Google enough copy to know where you fit into the search scheme of things. You must also satiate a client’s desire to find out about your business.
The majority of consumers now independently research their choices before making a purchase decision. Making it more important than ever to make use of copy and minimise the gaps in knowledge with video and content.
Font readability issues
Stay away from the trend of small, grey font- people hate it! Consider making your font large and dark to ensure customers can easily read your site. While it does not influence SEO, readability issues contribute to abandon rates in that when someone cannot see properly, they’ll choose your competitors.
You may also wish to ensure your site is disability compliant, especially if you aim to win government, arts and NFP bodies as clients as this is a key consideration for these kinds of organisations.
Include more text on pages
In order to make the most out of your keywords and perform well on an SEO level, it is recommended each page contains a minimum of 300 words per page.
Another significant reason for creating more content is to improve your HTML to text ratio. HTML is the code all websites are written in and can overshadow your page and post content if you don’t have enough words on the page for the search engine bots to read.
Set up an RSS feed
Once you have your blog set up, it’s a great idea to set up an RSS feed so that busy people who want to tune into your blog on a regular basis can be notified of your new blog posts. RSS helps interested people stay in touch with your site through having the relevant content sent to them each time you publish.
Use more rich media
Search engines love rich media, such as audios, videos and images, and people love it too. All other factors being equal, Google will serve a web page with a video over a web page without a video (second only to freshly made content...mmmm tasty).
Ensure with your videos you follow the same conventions for naming as listed about for photos, and include information in rich descriptions.
Use Google Plus and other social media
Social proof helps the search engines to be able to see that people actually enjoy your content. You gain this through using plugins such as Flare, Sharexy and Shareaholic. Each like, plus and tweet of your post content tells Google that people are happy to say they enjoy your content. So using a plugin that allows people to say they enjoy your blog content is a must.
Make email the centrepiece of your marketing strategy
Email marketing is still the best return on your marketing dollars and effort. Make sure to mail your list at least once a month, keeping it short, with plenty of links to your website (including your new pages, offers and blogs!)
Make your website mobile-friendly
Google is rolling out a new ranking update on April 22nd 2015 that will count responsiveness as a major ranking factor for websites. You can test how well your site performs via the Google Webmaster Mobile Responsiveness Tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
NOTE: Always check the impact of new plugins, Wordpress updates and additions to your site to ensure that your mobile responsiveness has not been adversely affected by changes.
Don’t forget the meta descriptions
While meta descriptions are no longer a straight ranking factor, including meta descriptions that describe the page to a potential searcher are a must. Taking the time to craft your meta descriptions means search engine users can make an informed decision whether to click or not on the result presented to them. This serves to lower your abandon rate through misguided clicks and up the click through rates by educating your customers properly. Nobody likes a blank listing in their search- so make it count!
Yoast is a fabulous Wordpress plugin that allows you the ability to craft great page titles and meta descriptions easily.
Want to know if your site is working well from an SEO perspective? Try these free tools:
http://www.siteliner.com/
http://www.sitereportcard.com/
http://www.seoptimer.com/
Things to know about SEO (that are surrounded by myth and conjecture):
Plurals don’t usually change results
You can use like terms within copy and the search engine will still know what to do
Each page should be treated as its own special entity in terms of back-end descriptions, page titles and keywords chosen
1 or 2 keyword phrases per page is awesome, stuffing a page with keywords as though it’s a turkey will probably just get you banned by Google
Google search bots favour page titles and neat hyperlinks that are keyword friendly
Phrases are better to use- the word “copywriter†will get a lot of different things, but “SEO coywriter†or “Sydney SEO copywriter†will get you closer to the market you want, and the better chance you have of ranking well. This means choosing 2 to 3 keywords as a phrase and remembering to localise it where possible
Variety is a swell thing. It’s great to choose a about 10 to 12 keyword phrases you’d like to highlight and include them
Google needs regular feeding of keyword rich content- so it’s in your best interest to incorporate blogging as part of your regular marketing
The selection of keywords is done through the Google Keywords tool. What you want to aim for is something that matches your product, isn’t hotly contested, and phrases that human beings use to describe what they are looking for. E.g. there is no point in ranking well in something to do with creative arts when you only get kids looking for courses pawing all over the site
Both the backend of the website (nerdy bit where content is put) and the front end (the bit a customer sees) need to have SEO work. This is done through providing headings, meta descriptions and using plug-ins to boast the body copy
Remember to use your business name. Nobody searches for “Our freelancer†when they look for you after that networking lunch. They look for your name.
Next lesson, we’ll look at how you can improve your off-page SEO performance.