For most small business owners thinking about a web site for their business, Google optimisation is
not thought about in any great detail (after all small business owners have a lot to think about). The sad reality is
if your web site is not search engine optimised you are really wasting any money you are spending.
Below is a Seach Engine Optimisation guide meant to provide some assistance to any small business owners trying to build their own web sites.
If you following the guidlines laid out below you will have a better chance of getting people to come to your web site. The guides are list in order of priority.
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Key Words:
There are two things really important to small business web sites..
1) what the customer sees,
2) what the search engine sees.
Make sure the search engine knows what you are trying to tell your customer; you do this by choosing the "Key" words from your message
and making sure those key words are in the text the customer will see, and also in the Meta tags at the top of the web page.
an example set of meta tags for this article are shown below:
<html>
<body>
<head>
<meta name="description"
content="there is much to think about when
building a small business web site..">
<meta name="keywords"
content="small business,websites,web sites,search engine optimisation">
:
:
The description should be a short summary of what you are talking about on the page.
The keywords should be a list of the most important words in the web page.
It would be remiss of me not talk about the choice of key words, it will be the single most important decision you will make
while building your small business web site, even the professionals get it wrong most of the time. As a business owner you need
to be thinking about "how will my customers be searching for my products or services?", the wrong choice in key words will mean your customers
wont be able to find you when they are searching for products, the wrong key word choices will have you competing with millions of other web sites,
again your customers wont be able to find you.
The other thing worth mentioning is key word stuffing; small business web sites usually fall into one of two categories,
1) the web site has no relevant key words at all.. or 2) key words have been placed every where (this is called key word stuffing), and despite
what you think, key word stuffing makes your Google search ranking worse not better, and it also detracts from the customer experience.
Its hard enough to compete on the Internet as a small business, you dont need to make it harder... the bottom line is search engines will slip
your search ranking if you use key word stuffing as a strategy.
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Page Title
Make sure every page has its own unique page title, make sure the page title is descriptive of the content in the page.
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External Links
Having other web sites containing links to your small business web site can see you leap frog over the competition very quickly.
Its not easy to do, but its well worth it.
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Domain Name:
Buy two domains, one that has your business name, and one that describes your product or service.
For example if your small business name is acme incorporated, and you sell widgets, you should have two domains,
one acme.com and the other widgets.com. You can point them both to the same web site if you
like; but search engines put a lot of emphasis on the domain name.
There is a lot more that can be said about search engine optimisation and small business web sites, but if you follow the above
guidelines you will get good search rankings when people are searching for you and your products on Google.