The Mummy Tree – SEO for Small Business

So what is SEO?

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the process of improving the ranking of a website or single webpage in search engines via the ‘organic’ (unpaid) listings. From recent research, we know that 60% of ALL clicks go to the top three results in the search engines, and the first result gets 37% of all clicks. This degrades down to 2.2% for the 10th result, and falls even further after that. If you’re not on the first page for your chosen search result, then that term has almost no business value.

What is a keyword and why is it so important?

Whenever I talk to small business owners about keyword research, I discover there is still a lot of questions and confusions surrounding what exactly keyword research is and why you need to do it. Writing for your site or building links back without doing keyword research first is like throwing big handfuls of mud at the wall and hoping that some of it sticks. Sure, you may get a small amount of traffic and sometimes hit the mark, but wouldn’t you rather get it right every time?

Keyword research is the foundation of your websites on page SEO. Get it wrong and all your online marketing efforts will be wasted. Get it right and you’ll witness better search engine rankings, more traffic and increased business. Proper keyword research can give you a huge jumpstart and make you leap ahead of your competitors, while poor keyword research will leave you no better off, even after many months of hard work.

Here are some tips on how to do proper keyword research for your business:

1. Come up with a number of combinations – the first step in keyword research is to list all the possible different combinations of keywords that your potential customer would use in a Google. This can include product names, brand names, general descriptions, service names and more. You can also include your geographic location or locations you service (for example virtual assistant northern NSW).

By combining these factors together you can build a list of possible keywords. For example a family daycare might build a list of possible keywords such as: Family daycare Ringwood, Childcare in Melbourne, Nanny and babysitting, Daycare vacancy. Think outside the box, often people search for the solution rather than the service.

2. Go to Google’s Keyword tool by clicking here. You can use this tool to further research on your list of keywords and narrow your list to keywords that:

  • Have the highest search volumes per month
  • Have an achievable level of competition
  • Have a buyer intent where possible e.g. good price baby clothes, emergency plumber
  • Have longtail keywords – these usually have less competition and since they are usually several in number, you can use them to build additional pages on your site or write blog posts on these topics. An example of a long tail keyword is “what type of washing method is best for mod cloth nappies?”

When using the keyword tool, make sure you select Australia from the Advanced Filter options (you may need to select All Countries and then select Australia after searching once) and select Exact and Broad from the Match Types option on the left.

A broad search means that someone searched for those words in that order, but included other words. For example: best baby boy’s clothes in Australia. An exact match search means that the search was for that term and that term alone, for example: baby boy’s clothes. As exact matches are easier to rank for in the beginning, you need the numbers on both.

The tool I use and love for keyword research is Market Samurai. As well as automating the above process for you, it has built in ‘golden rules’ to help with choosing good keywords and shows you full competition data for every keyword in an easy, colour coded graph, unlike the Google tool which only gives an estimation (full version). The keyword research module for Market Samurai is completely free for life, and I use it every day.

On Page SEO

On page SEO is everything you do on your website to optimise it for search engines. This includes content, website coding and both internal and external links. There are many things you can do on your site to help it rank better in the search engines.

If you use WordPress, then there are plugins available that can help you quickly write good SEO content and automate some of the process also.

1. The length of your articles –  In the post Panda era, 1000 word plus articles are the new standard. Make your content interesting and readable with plenty of sub headlines, bullet points, images and video so that it is user-friendly.

2. Use unique content, duplicated content is a big no-no. Using your own knowledge of your business you can come up with interesting and original articles, but if you can’t do this, then invest in a quality article writing service to produce your content for you.

3. Keyword density- its best to keep your keyword density low. If your stuff your keyword in the text, titles, meta tags and alt tags, it will do you more harm than good.

4. Internal backlinks – make sure to create internal backlinks on all your content. This means that you create interconnecting links from one page to the next, especially from your home page to the inner pages. This shows the search engines that all the pages on your site are interrelated to each other and improves your SEO.

5. Keyword placement- when writing your article, it is important to place your keyword in certain strategic areas:

  • In your main title
  • In your first sentence
  • Once or twice in the body of the text
  • In the last paragraph

6. Outbound links- it is equally important include outbound links to other sites. An outbound link is a link to an external website from your site. The best types of outbound links are to high page rank sites with a lot of authority and trust such as websites run by universities, government agencies, wikipedia and media outlets. All you need to do is find an article on these sites that is related to the content on your site and link to it.

7. Create a sitemap (a page that includes links to every area of your site) and include it in an easy to find text link on your front page. This helps the search engines find every area of your site.

Off Page SEO

Off page SEO is everything you do off your website to improve your rankings, and primarily consists of building backlinks to your website. There are good and bad backlinks, and bad ones can actually hurt your rankings.

A good backlink should have the following features:

1.  Aim for sites or pages that have a page rank of 3 or above. Every link to your site is a ‘vote’ for it in the search engines, and if the referring site is already thought of highly that vote will count for more. Page rank is not linear and a link from a single PR4 site can take the place of hundreds of links on PR1 or PR0 pages.

2. The link should have the correct anchor text based on proper keyword research. For example if you make greeting cards for birthdays and are targeting the following keyword –“ birthday greeting cards”, then use that Keyword as the anchor text for about 50% of your backlinks. The other 50% should be variations on the theme, so as to make your links look natural. The anchor text is that clickable text that contains a hyperlink to your URL.

3. Try to focus on building backlinks that also add quality content, such as posts on Web 2.0 sites, article directories, proper comments on other blogs (no spamming), guest blogging and profile links.

4. A good backlinks should be a contextual backlink. This is the type of backlink that is surrounded by text content such as in the middle of an article. This type of backlink is more powerful than those that appear on the side bar or footer, so try to use back linking methods that capitalise on this.

5. A good backlink should be on an ethical website rather than a dubious one that has gambling, pornographic, or other illegal or spammy sites. The search engines do pay attention to the sources of your backlinks and will either penalise or reward you depending on the quality of the source website.

6. Finally a good quality backlink should be from an actively used site that has fresh content added on a weekly basis as opposed to a dormant site. Having your backlinks on active sites means the search engines will quickly find those backlinks because those sites regularly get crawled and indexed by the search engines.

SEO Don’ts

There are certain SEO factors that are not looked upon favorably by the major search engines and that can ruin your search engine rankings. Participating in one of these techniques can ruin all your hard work, and so take care when doing your own SEO not to try any of the below.

Keyword Factors:

  • Keyword Stuffing- this is the worst practice to do as it results in an artificial keyword density of over 10% and may result in getting your site banned from the search engines.
  • Keyword dilution- this is when you are trying to SEO for an excessive number of keywords and most of the time the keywords are unrelated to one another. For example if you run a local bakery and your main keyword is “bakery in Brisbane”, trying to target 500 keywords on one site and  targeting keywords such as includes “shoe stores Brisbane” is keyword dilution.

Link Factors

  • Try to avoid having too many outbound links from your site to other sites because the search engines will think you are involved in link buying or spamming. One outbound link per article to an authority site is about right.
  • Outbound links to suspicious or unethical sites will tremendously hurt your rankings.
  • Cross linking is a big no-no as far as SEO is concerned and will result in getting your site penalised. Cross linking is when your site links to site A and site A links to site B and site B links back to your site.

Content Factors

  • Duplicate content is one of the most negative factors that can result in penalties. You should never have the same content on several pages of your website.
  • If you use Flash for movies on your site, remember that search engine spiders can’t index this content so provide a written description to accompany the movie.
  • Do not use images or flash as the sole content on your homepage or any other page. Even though it looks artistic and beautiful, it is SEO suicide since those pages will not get indexed.

 

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