| Small Business - About Setting up Your Budget SEO |
| Invention Development Advice - Internet Marketing | |||
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A lot of small business websites never see the benefits that they could get with a little search engine optimization. It's not all that surprising really. Small business start ups are over- worked, usually out of time, more often than not out of money and on top of it all there is something truly intimidating about the idea of search engine optimization. It's unfortunate, because its not all that difficult to do.
A lot of small business websites never see the benefits that they could get with a little search engine optimization. It's not all that surprising really. Small business start ups are over- worked, usually out of time, more often than not out of money and on top of it all there is something truly intimidating about the idea of search engine optimization. It's unfortunate, because its not all that difficult to do. We can start by losing some of the smoke and mirrors that many people use to obscure some of the simpler truths about SEO. Its only a series of steps to follow, so that customers can find you on the web. If a lot of them aren't carved in stone, that's because they tend to change a lot. And yes, there are a lot of steps to follow, not necessarily in an exact order and for many people the biggest problem is figuring out where to start. The many different SEO service providers will all go about it in different ways. A big part of each presentation will be to demonstrate that they have the best approach - usually presented as the ONLY viable approach and since so few small business owners have any idea what they're talking about, they can pretty much say whatever they want. So you can be told that press releases are all you need, or totally useless, maybe you should blog - or maybe not and now that social networking is enjoying its 15 minutes of fame the companies who specialize in it claim that everything that went before it is now a waste of time. The conflicting input can freeze you in your tracks. Well, you can't stay frozen forever, and if you aren't simply rolling in money you're going to have to dig in and learn something about seo so you need to pick a starting point and about the best I can think of is "keywords". Hopefully you've at the very least been exposed to the idea of keywords when you were studying the viability of your business idea in the first place - analysing the market demand?? Keywords are the words or phrases that your future online customers who are about to find you in the search engines are going to type in to describe what they're looking for. Oh, and I'm sorry to say that until you're Proctor and Gamble and your brands are that well known, the name of your company will not likely be one of the keywords you're going to rank on. Your keywords ( and most will be phrases- not single words) need to be those that people are already using. I've found that if you search carefully you should be able to find a range of phrases from 5,000 maybe if you're lucky up to about 25-30 thousand monthly searches, but be happy with 3-4 phrases per main page that average about 12,000 searches per month each. At the most basic identification of the level of competition for the phrase you'll want to have less that 300,000 pages returned in a search for your keyword phrase and be sure to wrap it in quotation marks when you're doing your estimates. Different pages in your site need different levels of search volume to be successful. Your biggest phrases - the ones with more than 50,000 monthly searches will probably be for your home page, because your home page is the broadstroke sweep of everything you sell - and lets be honest - it's going to take you a while to get anywhere on the really big searches and competitive terms. But as you look at the categories of products or services you sell- for instance if you're selling patio furniture your categories might be wicker, wood, teak, wrought iron....those more targeted terms will have smaller search volumes and less competition- until you get right down to the products themselves. There will be a hierarchy of keywords and phrases for your site - hopefully all of them will be buying terms. Going back to patio furniture the first thing that might come to mind is "backyard". But backyard is not a buying term - its so broad that its almost meaningless. But the heirarchy will dictake that the broader the interest of any single page the bigger the main search terms will be and as you move into your site and your information and/or your products become progressively more focussed, so too will the keywords you use to position those pages on the web. Just remember, you're going to have lots of keywords, not 1 or 2, but depending on the size of your site anything from 12 to 40 main phrases and literally dozens of variations and long tails. And if it all looks like too much to keep straigh, just pull back from it for a minute and focus on picking the words page, by page. In spite of saying that you want people to find your site, the don't need to find the whole thing - just one page of it! More information: By Louise Collins, author of Start Up Mistakes. For information on how to start a website without losing your shirt- check it out.
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