Written by Matthew J. De Reno Thursday, 14 April 2011 09:34

How To Increase Your Small Business Search Engine Rankings For Free

A well-engineered website and close attention to how you create and publish web content is key to increasing your ranking with the major search engines. This article will explain what you can do now, as a small business owner, to maximize your website's search rankings without spending a dime. 

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. There are a myriad of companies providing services that will "optimize" your site for the most popular search engines, such as Google, with the expectation that your website will appear higher in the search results relevant to your website. Expect to pay a pretty penny for such services. I will not devalue professional SEO services, but much of what these SEO companies provide, you can do for free. 

Before we begin, remember this: when it comes to search, Google reigns supreme. Upwards of 70-percent of your web traffic will likely originate from a Google search. Therefore, a key to increasing your website search engine rankings is understanding what Google is looking for when it crawls your website. Although Google doesn't publish its search algorithm to determine your website ranking and SERP (search engine results placement), it is widely agreed the following factors weigh heavily with Google.

Inbound Links (Super Important!)

How many other sites link to you is a "vote" of importance for you website. Example: a site about "foo" that has 1000s of incoming links tells Google that the site must be important when it comes to the subject of "foo." Out bound links don't really do much for you as you can choose to link to whatever site you want. This obviously opens the door for gaming the rankings by creating bogus sites that link to other bogus sites for search engine ranking purposes only.  Such content farm sites are routinely targeted and filtered out by Google. Incoming links from these "black hat" sites can be detrimental to your rankings. 

Freshness

How often you update your content is important.  Sites that don't change content regularly will fall in search rankings. Conversely, sites that update content regularly will climb in rankings.  It is as simple as that.  In my opinion, you should treat your content like perishable goods.  Eventually, your content will go stale.  Keep your site constantly updated with new and interesting content.  A regularly updated website likely contains the latest and greatest information on "foo".  People interested in "foo" don't want to read an article on "foo" that has been hanging around the web for years.  The latest article on "foo" is likely the one of most value to a Google user.    

Relevancy

Do the articles on your site have the key words people are searching for? Google only looks at the actual content - the text in the article for so-called key words. Metatags - key words you can append to your content - are far less important then they once were since people would just add tons of key words in metatag fields that sometimes did not relate to the article. For instance, adding "Britney Spears" as a key word in an article about "oil and gas attorneys". Metatags are used to mostly group your content versus rank it.

Frequency

How often do the key words appear?  Google purportedly places value on key words that appear often in the body of an article on the notion that an article that mentions "foo" ten times is likely to be more relevant than one where "foo" is used mentioned once.  

Originality

Google loves unique content. If your content reads like a slightly different version of a Wikipedia article then you will fair poorly in regards to this criteria. Be original. Create your own unique content. You can do this by simply sharing your thoughts and opinions about things you know better than anyone else. A good place to start is editorializing about your industry, organization, and profession. You probably have ideas about these things that nobody else has. You surely have experiences that no one else can claim to have.  Great. Share them. Blog them. Be read. Be searched.  

Content Is King

This has been a popular saying for the last decade when it comes to anything web related. If your focus is on developing the best, most unique, relevant, original, and appropriately titled and tagged content, the search engines will smile look upon your website and call it good. Yes, this advice is sort of like rolling up a bunch of stuff discussed in this article into one rule of thumb, but I think it bears worth mentioning time and again: content is king. Now kneel before it.

SEO Strategy and Tools

Remember the old saw that goes people don't plan to fail, they fail to plan? That saying is especially true when it comes to increasing your website search rankings.  Good SEO may be free, but it doesn't happen without a plan. You need to sit down and hack out a detailed plan about how you will endeavor to meet the criteria outlined in this article. Only then can you expect to achieve good search results.

If you are a small business, this might be the last thing you have time to do. If you are serious about getting the most out of what your website can offer you, however, then you must come up with a strategy about SEO, even if that strategy is to go with an SEO company to do it all for you. 

If you opt to use an SEO company, at least you made the decision to put the plan in someone else's hands.  As such, you will at least know what the SEO company should be doing for you.  What they should be doing for you is integrating the following tools, strategies, and techniques I discuss in the next sections of this article.  Once again, this is all stuff you can do yourself providing you have the time.

Email Newsletters

Emailing your articles in a newsletter form will generate a lot of links back to your site. This scores well with Google's Inbound link criteria.  Okay, chances are you might have to pay for a program to manage this for you, but in theory, emailing a link to a new article to all your Outlook contacts is a form of an email newsletter.  You could do that for free.  

Blogs

A blog is nothing more than an article about some subject on the web published in reverse chronological order (most recent first). Blogs score will with Google's freshness, relevancy, and frequency criteria above. With a syndication feed ("A Site From Scratch" will have this feature by default), a site visitor can "subscribe" to your website. This creates an inbound link and a vote for your site's importance.

Social Web

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not merely used to keep track of what your friends are doing. They can be powerful promoters of your website, hence the reason so many businesses have Facebook accounts and what have you. Your free social network account can provide direct links to your business website. A post on Twitter about "foo" might get everybody "following" your site to see what the "foo" is going on.  Here are the most important social media options to consider:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Google+

Traditional marketing

The laws of marketing do not cease to exist when it comes to your website. All the rules of traditional marketing still work with a website and are critical to promoting your site, especially in the early goings.  Put your site name on your business card, stationery, and whatever else you can think of.  Tell your clients, associates, Grandma and whoever. Get the word out.  Many email programs allow you to append a personalized signature.  This is should include a link to your website.

Repeat Visitors

You want to keep your regular customers coming back. Good content that is frequently updated and relevant to your site should give visitors a reason to do this.  Your site visitors should stink like inlaws that stay too long in the family room.  As such you want to pay attention to your site's "bounce rate" which is generally the percentage of people that visit your site and leave immediately after getting there. This can tell you that your content is really not what they were looking for.

Fast Websites

Nothing will "bounce" a visitor off your site faster than a page that takes forever to load.  Be aware that you should keep graphics to a minimum to maximize the speed of your site.  Text loads way faster than a large picture and text is really what Google is looking for in the first place. 

Likely Reasons Why Your Site Is Slow

• Too Many Graphics - Keep image files to a minimum and be mindful of how many are incorporated into your site's design template. Use CSS to render things like rounded corners and other design elements that previously could only be accomplished with images. 
• Lack of An Appropriate Web Server or Web Hosting Environment - Is your website hosted on a shared IP address with 8,000 other websites that all tap into the same system resources? Yes, shared hosting is cheap, but there are reasons why it is so cheap and it mostly stems from all the other sites that share the same  resources. Most professional services and small business websites should be powered by a content management system. There is little reason not to have a CMS system like Joomla powering your website.  
• Poor Markup - See our subheading on semantic markup.
• Bloated Code In General - Does your site maintain tons of unnecessary files, legacy components no longer needed, and images galore?  Was the site updated and old deprecated code sections have not been fully cleaned up?  Keep your code tight.

Semantic Markup

A well-engineered site should incorporate semantic markup, which means that the tags that format your content should tell us something about what it is. So what are semantic tags?  Semantic tags convey meaning and importance. Your content titles should be wrapped in "H1" headings, subheadings in "H2", etc. The H1 tag indicates a heading level 1, which means it is more important than a word tagged with an H2 tag, and so on. Yes, this is HTML stuff, but nothing that you can't ensure is being done to maximize your content in the first place.  If you don't know what those tags are or mean, you probably didn't design your website.  Or, if you did, you used some sort of graphical program, which is essentially leaving the optimization of your site to a sad afterthought.  Learn some basic HTML to know how to semantically mark up your text. 

Text Content

All your important content should be text-based.  Fancy graphics look great, but do very little for your search rankings. As explained previously, a lot of images will cause your site to load slowly and Google is reportedly now penalizing sites that load slow. Just remember that search engines are generally crawling the web looking for words (i.e., text) so all of your critical product and service information should be explained within the context of text based articles.  Yes, a picture may say a thousand words, but Google will only see one word - a picture that is merely one slow loading image file that tells the crawler very little about what the image is actually displaying.

I can't emphasize it enough: make sure you feature text-based content! And, if you must use images, make sure they contain "alt tags" that add some words to a blind image file.

Usability

Is your site laid out well?  Can people with disabilities quickly get the content they need?  Is the text size readable?  Does your content need translated?  What. Does your site still look good if displayed in a lap top, netbook, and smart phone?   How does it look in different browsers such as Firefox, IE, Chrome, and Safari? 

Good SEO is mostly free!

Within reason, every tool and technique discussed in this article does not require money or arcane knowledge that only a highly paid SEO guru can provide.  You can simply look at your small business website and its content and determine how you fare in regards to the criteria above. High rankings and good search results with Google and other search engines is largely the end result of a concerted and well-thought strategy, a well-structured website as well as a commitment to developing good, original, fresh content for your small business website.

You can use tools and strategies such as blogs, social networking sites, email newsletters and more to promote your content. That being said, if you don't want to be bothered with all this SEO stuff, then an SEO company can be a good option. A good SEO company should work with you ensuring you are doing the things mentioned in this article. Be wary of any SEO company, however, that uses tricks and gimmicks to game the search engines with hidden links, key word overloading, link exchange, spam, and more. As a legitimate small business, you don't want to have your site "Black Listed" by Google, which means it will effectively disappear from all search results.

You can ensure that whoever builds and maintains your website does all the basics described in this article: not bogging it down with images, tagging content inappropriately, and generally making sure the site is fast and provides great content. Do this and you can not only maximize your search engine rankings for your small business but your bottom line as well.