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Advanced SEO Tips for Small Business

Advanced SEO Tips for Small Business

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A website blog is actually one of the most effective marketing tools for online business owners of all types, from one-person operations to large companies. Furthermore, the ability to write your own content and publish to an audience interested in your products or services is quite powerful when it comes to drawing in potential customers. Quality content on your blog can engage your audience on a more direct level and help influence a customer to purchase a product. SEO is an important part of your blogging efforts as it can bring in more potential customers to your website from external sources such as other blogs, social media websites and of course search engines. For those who already have some experience with SEO, knowing the basics can help launch your efforts to new heights.

However, there are some more advanced tips that can help you reach an even wider audience and make your blog posts better at sales conversion. What follows are a few advanced SEO tips that can help you make the most out of your blogging efforts.

Craft your Content for Searches

While targeting keywords and key phrases are essential in having potential customers find your website, the real key is creating content that people actually want to find. What this means is that your keyword search should be geared towards what people are looking for and writing good content based on that information.

This means writing content that is not time sensitive and providing answers to information that is frequently searched on your topics. You can mix in posts about new information or news about your niche, but the bulk of your content should center on providing information that customers want.

Build more Static Pages

While blog posts can do quite well, static pages can perform even better. This is because the time or date that a post is published can cause it to fluctuate on search results when similar, newer content is published on other sites.

By creating independent static pages for your more extensive posts, guides or useful information, it can actually help protect their status in the rankings because it will be seen as timeless. You may have noticed this when searching on particular subjects, so copy their efforts and put your most valuable information that is timeless on a separate static page.

Build on Successful Posts

If you have posts that have received a considerable amount of back links, then focus more of your efforts on producing similar content. Remember, you don’t want to duplicate your most successful posts as much as you want to build upon them by adding new information. By building on success, you will create even more successful posts that people will link and share.

Be User Friendly

You want your blog to be as open and friendly as possible, so be sure to invite others to write posts, make it easy to line or share what you have written, link your work to sources that can be trusted, cut down on ads that interrupt reading and encourage your readers to comment. Good conversation can help you build up your blog.

By following these tips, you can increase your overall audience and better sell the products or services that you provide.

Intro to SEO for Business Owners

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Search engine optimization now represents one of the crucial aspects of building any online business.  Achieving high ranking on Google’s organic search results can mean the difference between attracting customers and drowning in oblivion.  Adopting several key strategies will greatly enhance your chances of doing well against the competition.

For the last several years, SEO has come to be synonymous with business survival on the web.  Unfortunately, whenever there is a starving crowd, unscrupulous operators are bound to enter the fray. Given this state of affairs, business owners should gain a solid, basic understanding of the principles of SEO in order to protect themselves from getting ripped off.

The first step in understanding optimization for the web is to gain a sense of how your site is performing relative to the competition. Running a check of your site on search engine results pages will give you a quick snapshot of your site’s ranking and will help to shed some light on who may be visiting your site and if they are a targeted user that will convert or stay long on your site.

Second, many business owners fail to understand that SEO, at its core, seeks to align the content of your site with the mind of your target market.  The greatest mistake a business owner can make is to simply produce content without regard to how it will appear on search engines.  For example, many people believe that thinking up a snappy name for a website will automatically bring in traffic.  However, this is often a tragic mistake.  The reason is that unless sufficient numbers of people are typing in your site’s name, or the words that make up your site name, it will never come up on the search engine results.

To expand on this concept, think of the average user sitting at the keyboard typing in a search into Google.  Let’s say you own a website on car repair.  You have to think in terms of what the average person looking for information on car repair will type into Google – and then develop relevant, reliable and authoritative content for your site to match the user’s search.

This, in essence is search engine optimization.  There are tools that help you search and identify certain keywords or keyword phrases, together with the relative supply and demand.  To optimize your site you need to create pages with content revolving around these keywords.

A word of caution, over populating your page with too many keywords in will earn you a penalty from the search engines. This is also known as keyword spamming and is frowned upon in the search engine industry. Generally, key words should make up no more than two percent or three percent of the total copy on a page.

Third, update your content frequently. The search engines crave new, relevant material.  Trying to produce too much at one time will likely lead to burn out. Rather, adopting a steady schedule of content production over time will eventually help your site gain more visitors.  In addition to updating, produce articles of information and post them on other sites such as personal or professional blogs, article directories, news sites, and other outlets that allow you to create a link back to your site.  Here, too, there are certain rules to obey. The sites should be related to your website. Don’t fall for so-called black hat operators who promise you the moon (at a premium price). Instead, take the high road and become a purveyor of good information.  Ultimately, good business principles are the same whether you are online or offline.