In this first post of the series of articles devoted to organic SEO for small businesses I want to make a detailed look at the area of search engine optimization (SEO) focussing general features of organic SEO for small businesses.
So, internet budgets are usually very small or non-existent for most typical small businesses so organic SEO is critically important for websites which want to rank well on the search engines, like Google.
Organic SEO is a slow and steady process that requires planning and hard work and the first step is a SEO friendly web design, see such good sites like JohnChow.com, problogger.net or www.theblogismine.com :). Many small businesses get caught up in the production of fancy graphics and stuffing lots on photos on a small number of web pages. This is not an ideal strategy for search engine optimization and will probably lead to low rankings.
The number of web pages required by a small business website should be dictated by the amount of products and services they offer as well as the number of key-phrases they wish to use in the optimization process. Pages titles should be based on the selected key-phrases. Of course, if you have a website based on Wordpress platform you must use “All In One SEO” plugin.
Search engines work primarily with text rather than images so it is very important that each webpage has at least 2-3 paragraphs of good, relevant content and appropriate headings. Small businesses often wonder why their disclaimer page is one of their strongest pages; this is because disclaimer pages usually contain plenty of text unlike most of their other web pages.
Link building is the next major step in Organic SEO. If you want to achieve good rankings on search engine results pages you will need links to your website from other good quality relevant web sites. The amount of quality links you will need depends on how competitive the market is for the key-phrases that you are targeting.
Link Building is on-going process that should be formally managed and while there are many tools available for this purpose a spreadsheet will often suffice for a small business. This is also important when providing reciprocal links though small business should not engage in this practice until they have a significant number of incoming links and then the amount of reciprocal links made available should never exceed 25% of the number of incoming links.
The second part of this series of articles will take a look at link building for small businesses including free and paid web directories, social media and etc.
