Happy Friday to all!! It’s a beautiful day: the sun is shining, birds are chirping… a perfect time to share a few small business SEO Tips. These tips came from a great post at Search Engine Land - I want to highlight the ones I live and breathe by:

1. Have web analytics on your site right away. Far too often I see that people don’t see the value in analytics and it makes me scratch my head. What people have trouble with is understanding it. We use WebClickTracker which is inexpensive and gives you all the data you need to understand where your traffic is and is NOT coming from. More than that, it will tell you what keywords people are using and pages they are visiting. I use this every single day.
2. Keyword Research before you do anything else. Not doing the keyword research first is like driving in a foreign country without a map or knowing the language. You just go forward aimlessly. There are lots of free seo tools that will help you understand what keyphrases people are typing in. PLUS, if you do small business tip #1, then you’ll have the analytics in place to tell what which phrases are already working for your site.
3. Make sure your website is SEO friendly. How can you tell? The first thing I would check is how many pages Google has indexed for you. Go to Google and type in site:www.yourwebsiteurl.com and see the results. Or go to Marketleap’s content saturation tool. Sometimes this is really surprising for people. If you know you have 50 pages on your site, but Google or Marketleap shows 5: Houston, we have a problem. It could be multitude of things - your whole site is in Flash, there are barely any links on the site, there are dead ends on the site. If you have no idea, then call a reputable SEO firm in your area. Many times, they’ll do a quick analysis for free.
4. Sitemap, sitemap, sitemap. Did I say “sitemap” yet? It astounds me that websites are still out there without them. Again - would you travel a foreign country without a map? Maybe - but it will take you much longer to get around and you may not find what you are looking for. This can happen with both users and search engines. And search engines are full of online ADD. They’ll bail if there is no where for them to go. A sitemap is a search engine spiders best friend.
5. Title Tags. This one little line of code is vital to your website. Not only does it make an impact in the search engines, it can make an impact with the end user. The title tag shows up as the result. If it just says “Company Name”. . . how likely would YOU be to click on that listing if you were looking for a stainless steel ball valve. . .

These are my top 5 tips for someone starting out with SEO on their site. There are hundreds of things to do for a website - but start with the fundamentals and understand why you’re doing those things. Once you ace the first steps, then start moving on with the more advanced SEO tactics.

You won’t hear from us much in the next week, as it’s the 4th of July and our offices are closed!

Have a happy 4th of July!!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 8:11 am and is filed under General, Industrial SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.