seo for small business

© 2011 Promodo [email protected]

United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681

United States+1 347 809-34-86

SEO for Small Business

Anna Moseva, SEO analyst

Webinar




Why traditional means of advertising are a bad option for small businesses?

high cost

complexity of tracking the effectiveness

lack of interest of potential customers at the moment of contact




Advantages of online marketing:

you are only reaching your potential customer when he is looking for something you can offer

you can choose to target specific audiences

you can track the effectiveness of the campaign easily

you can advertise and sell 24/7

you can present much more information about your business and services and in a more organized way online

it all comes at a very low price!




What makes SEO the best online marketing mean for small businesses?

high return on investment – you do not have to pay for each new visitor your get

excellent analytics software allows effective tracking and timely correction of the campaign

successful SEO campaign provides a steady flow of free search engine traffic, which will not stop abruptly after you stop spending money on it




Building SEO Campaign: Stages

Setting goals

Competitors research & Market Analysis

Keywords research

On-Site SEO

Link building campaign

Results analysis




Competitors Research & Market Analysis




Remember that innovation is adorable but it is actually rarely successful.

Innovation vs Imitation

vs

vs

vs




Who to spy?

Type into Google a couple of the most popular queries in your niche. Sites occupying top 20 positions in the SERPs are worth studying and copying.




How to spy?

Study the SERPs with SEO Quake plug-in turned on

After you have figured out the sites that have the smallest Alexa rank number, go to Semrush.com site and add your competitors url into the field.




How to spy?




Keyword Research




Keyword ideas got from competitors’ analysis + a nice big list you have brainstormed + Google AdWords Keyword Tool ideas = rough sketch of your target queries




Rules essential for a quality keyword research::

Do not focus on too broad and general queries, develop a good list of long tale keyword phrases.




Mind the competition.

Stay reasonable, choose only relevat keywords.

Try to find your golden middle – make up a full and exhaustive keyword list, but do not forget that you will have to optimize for all the words you have chosen.

Understand the search volumes Google Keyword Tool hints you right.

Do not forget about the keywords your site is already ranking for.




Choose correct landing pages, do not focus on the home page only.

On-Site SEO

Meta tags

Title




Rules to observe when creating title tags:

Make sure it is grammatically correct, readable, good for SEO and remember that only the first 70 characters of the title will be visible in the Google SERPs.

Put the most relevant keywords to the left of the title and end it up with the brand name.

<title> Baltic Amber Jewellery, Mammoth Ivory and Gemstone Handmade Jewelry at Amberexpert </title>

Make sure every single page of the site has a unique title.

Use the maximum of 2-3 keyphrases.




Description tag

Snippet is only 150 characters long in the SERPs so try to fit into it the summery of the webpage described + call-to-action + a couple of keywords

Create unique description tags on all significant pages

Mind that the description tag will appear in the SERPs along with the title tag, make sure they look natural togather.

Remember that the use of competitor brands in meta tags is illegal in most countries




Text optimization.

h1, h2 tags

Put a different keyword in each ‘h‘ tag you are usingMake h1 different from the title as thus you will cover more target keyphrase variantsUse CSS to reduce the huge font h1 tag creates by default

Hyperlinks with the relevant anchor text

<a href=http://www.exemple.com>Anchor text which forms link when viewed in browser</a>

Rather than something like «click here» or «see more» put your keywords into the anchor text and point the link to the relevant landing pageTry to use the same relevant anchor text both in the navgation menus and in body copyMake the link useful for the user, they should follow it naturally and intuitively




Outbound linking

Some outbound links to trusted and highly authoritative resources will make your site look better in the eyes of most search engines

Keep the overall number of links per page (both external and internal) not

exceeding 100of most search enginesLink to non-competitive relevant third-party sites that might be really helpful for your visitors




Means to ensure proper indexing of your website

First of all it is very important and convenient for site owners and webmasters to add their sites to Google Webmaster Tools.

Helps you track:

site’s loading speed

crawl errors

duplicate title and description tags

pace of site’s indexation




Robots.txt

Full set of commands and names of different bots can be found at this link http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion-admin.html

21.3.11© 2011 Promodo www.promodo.com

[email protected] Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681


Sitemaps

Document that lists all the pages of your site and is placed in its root directory.

.xml .html

Page on your site that lists the links to all its pages.

Can be generated with a help of online http://www.xml-sitemaps.com and downloadable tools - Xena and SiteMap Generator

Serves an additional mean of navigation for the users..

Do not forget to add the link to it in your Google Webmaster Tools




Link Building Campaign

Directories submission

Social bookmarks submission

WordPress themes sponsoring

“Do follow” relevant to your niche blogs commenting

21.3.1121.3.11© 2011 Promodo www.promodo.com



Link building – maximize your effort

Use your keywords for the anchor text of your backlinks

Chose sites relevant to your niche for backlinking

Pay attention to authority rather than page rank

Remember about the variety of your backlink profile

Also remember that you can get links through onsite optimization. Give out stuff! Offer guides, widgets, downloadable tutorials etc.

21.3.1121.3.1121.3.11© 2011 Promodo www.promodo.com



Monitoring and results analysis

To fully understand all the causes and effects of the campaign we strongly recommend you to install a complete set of Google Analytics tracking code onto your site

Monitor your site in Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools regularly

Check your site rankings in the search engines at least once a week with a help of different tools (e.g. Rank Checker)

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Alternative ways of small businesses promotion and new trends in SEO




Alternative ways of search:

local search

shopping search

video search

images search and etc.

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Local search or Google places




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Local search or Google places




Register with Google Local Business

Some things to pay attention to in order to rank better in local results:

Company address must conform to the address mentioned in its local business profile and the city of search or geographical modificator

Citation of a Company (Infobel.com, Kompass.com, Leonardo.com, Hotfrog.com, Tupalo.com, TripAdvisor.com (for travel agencies) etc.)

Categories associated with the registration

Fact of registration in Google Local Business

Keywords in a Business Listing Title

Traditional SEO

Amount of reviews in Google Maps

Address on a landing page

Make use of micro formats


[email protected]



Microformats

Currently Google supports 8 microformats, including:

people (defining name, job, address)

products (defining brand, price, reviews, category of the product and etc.)

recipes (cooking time, reviews, type of the dish, date published)

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146897




Google Products or Shopping Search

Great opportunity for online shops to get one more traffic source of people 100% ready to buy




Google Products or Shopping Search

To make use of this terrific tool you need to go through the process pretty much similar to Google local business registration:

sign up for an account with Google Merchant center, fill in the information about your business type and location, verify your account

upload a data feed containing the info about your products manually or with a help of Google API

Mind that for now you can only target 10 countries through Google Product Search: the USA, the UK, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Australia, Japan, China and the Netherlands.

http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/topic.py?topic=30061




Video and Image Search

If you place some interesting and relevant to your site tutorial or snapshot make sure to optimize this kind of content too.

alt tags for images.

<img id="image" src="http://site.com/bracelet_11.jpg" alt="Baltic amber star shape pieces bracelet. Cognac colour" title="Baltic amber star shape pieces bracelet. Cognac colour" />

great tool for both images and video optimization is creating special sitemaps




Video and Image Sitemaps

An entry for a page containing a video would usually look like this:

Here you need to put the url of the page containing a video, its title (make sure it has one or two target keywords), description of the video, tags of the video and its category.

Images sitemap looks simpler:

It allows you to add image location data, image title, caption, geographic location and even license.




Takeaways

SEO is a perfect tool for small businesses promotion

Plan your SEO campaign carefully, monitor and spy on your successful competitors

Spare no effort on keyword research as it is the foundation of your future success

Examine your landing pages and optimize them both for search engines and real visitors

Pay attention to the content — the text of the title and body needs optimization first of all

Treat link building seriously, be patient and get great results in the long run

Follow the latest trends in SEO, optimize for alternative ways of searchesTrack, monitor and analyze your performance regularly




Thank you for your attention!

Anna MosevaPromodo

[email protected]

seo for small business

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building seo campaign

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