Almost every business online needs SEO to make sure they get to the top of the search engines ahead of their competitors, but how do you know what SEO services you need, and what is SEO anyway? SEO stands for search engine optimisation, and this is just a collection of techniques and tricks that helps you get indexed favorably in search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!. You’ll want to focus on specific keywords that are geared towards your “niche” or business type, so your customers can find you when they’re looking for what you offer online! If you’re selling urban street art, you’ll want to use “urban street art” as a keyword. You’ll have a list of keywords to optimise your site for, and you’ll also want to make sure that you do all the other SEO services that will help you get that edge on your competition.

Why You Need Professional SEO Services

There are amateurs everywhere that are offering really cheap SEO, but can you really trust them? Doing SEO for your website is really a one shot game; if you mess it up you may not be able to get to the top of the search engines, and even worse you may end up banned from Google and the other search engines. Don’t leave the future of your business in hands that aren’t sure of what they’re doing! When you get a professional, you get people who have done this before and know what needs to be done to make sure that your site gets to where it needs to be.

How Long Does SEO Take?

When you get professional SEO services, it can take anywhere from a couple weeks to get the results that you need all the way to a couple of months. SEO isn’t just a one shot thing that you have to take care of when you site launches online though! You’re going to have to stay on top of it for years to come, but with the right company you won’t have to do this yourself. They’ll charge you a monthly fee to do SEO maintenance and to keep your site relevant, and all you’ll have to do is focus on your business and your customers like you should be!

Why it’s Better to Hire a Company

When you want to have you SEO done, it’s best to just go ahead and hire a company. When you have someone in your office doing it, you end up taking them away from the tasks they were hired to do in the first place and you also run into the newbie factor. Make sure that your SEO is in experienced hands and avoid some of the pitfalls that a lot of people run into when trying to get their websites seen by the search engines with a professional company!

When you’re hiring a company, ask for references and a pricelist for ALL the services that they provide. If you’re looking for a good SEO company, check us out!

Every business needs a web presence, but how do you get one? How do you make sure your local and international customers can find you, and how can you make sure you do it on a budget that’s both affordable and helpful? Here we’re going to go over what SEO is, how you can get SEO for your small business online, and how to utilize it effectively to bring you the customers you need to start growing your business and get profitable!

What is SEO?

SEO is search engine optimisation, or how you can make your website play nicely with the search engines to drive traffic to your website. Each site has its own algorithms, but they all follow the same general rules that you can follow to get your site some new traffic.

Keywords

The first thing you want to do is identify the top keywords that people are going to use to find your website; while competition for keywords can be fierce, if you know how to customize your keywords you’ll do fine. If you’re a local plumber, use your area (Atlanta or New Brunswick for example) and combine it with “plumbing emergencies” or “24 hour plumber” to start getting that local link juice! This is also known as “geo targeting”; focusing on local areas to make sure you’re hitting your local market. If you’re working with a larger audience, you should still aim for your home area to bring in the best customers possible. Competing with the national market can be tricky, but it’s doable!

Backlinking

Another good way to get traffic to your site and good SEO running is backlinking. There are many ways of doing back linking, so you’ll want to check each one out to see how they work for you.

The first way is article marketing; article marketing allows you to get links back from higher PR (PageRank) sites to bring up your relevance in the search engines. You’ll want to be careful about what sites you use for article marketing.

Forum backlinks are also a good way to get link juice; you can leave relevant posts (don’t talk about children’s toys in an adults with Alzheimer’s forum for example) that get people to click on the links voluntarily, as well as get the search engines to take notice of what you’re selling.

SEO for small businesses is all about getting the exposure you need to get your customers to your website. Use keywords that target your local area, outsource your tasks to save time, and work on back linking to bring in people.

Building strong SEO content is one of the most important things any business can do to stand out. This can be with a blog or guest blogging, article marketing on high page ranking sites, or great comments that will give relevance and value to your links, and will make the search engines (especially Google) take notice of what you’re offering. The first thing you should do is create content that’s GOOD that people want to read. Then you want to go over what keywords you’re using!

Understand Your Keywords

Everyone has keywords for their niche, but are you using the right ones to bring the right traffic to your website? When you’re looking at the keywords you’re using, you need to start paring them down to the best options; long tail keywords help, but you want to specialise what keywords you want to use for all of your SEO content. If you’re selling iPod cases, you’ll want to use special keywords for your content like “spotted iPod cases” if you’re selling spotted iPod cases or “pink iPod cases” if you’re
selling pink iPod cases. Look over what you’re doing and maximise exactly what you’re selling; if you just put “iPod cases” in your SEO and people aren’t looking for the specific thing you’re selling, you’re going to lose their interest and it’s a wasted effort.

Make it Unique

After you’ve come to grips with what keywords you need to be successful, you’re going to need content. Content canbe everything from articles on article directories that link back to your site, to your block posts and other written material like product descriptions and mission statements on your website. Even if you received product descriptions from your suppliers, you’ll want to make them unique and your own! You can be penalised by Google for not having unique content and you can probably think up
some better product descriptions than the ones you received! If you’re using PLA (private label rights) or other articles, rewrite them so you can have unique good content, but pay attention to all of your keyword densities so you don’t have to rewrite them later.

Understand Keyword Densities

Keyword densities are what the search engines like Google are looking for when they’re scanning your page. Everything is looked at, and you’ll want to have the right densities for the job. One time per hundred words is usually okay, but you may want it to appear more depending on what you’re selling whether it’s products or services. Look at how the sites ahead of you on Google craft their content and how many times their keywords appear on the page (there are many free tools out there to check keyword densities on articles) so you can see what different densities will respond better with your SEO campaigns.

When you’re starting out with SEO, you’re going to make mistakes! We all make them, and it can be hard to puzzle out just exactly what the search engines want and how to formulate your SEO plan to get the results you need. Here we’re going to go over how the SEO algorithms work, why they’re so tough to get around, and what you need to do to get the best results on your SEO campaign.

Why is it so Difficult to Place in Search Results?

Years ago when the web was new, people found all kinds of tricks to get good rankings in the search results. If you used the internet from 2000 to 2004, you can remember how almost every search term brought up gaggles of porn results. People quit trusting the search engines and lost trust in searches, so the search engines had to figure out how to weed out bad results; thus the algorithm was born! Each search engine has its own formula, but you’ll be able to tailor your SEO campaign to make sure you that you’re getting the results that you need.

If it was Easy Everyone Would do it

If getting high up in the rankings were easy, everyone would do it! You want to make sure you’re getting the best results, but you also have to give the search engines something in return: value. If what you’re putting out there is of little value, no one is going to keep using that search engine that delivers crap results. So by providing real value to the eyeballs that land on your page, you’ll be able to get the results you need to get your site the ranking it needs to survive and thrive.

How to do SEO the Right Way

Doing SEO the right way is a combination of tactics like:

Backlinks – Backlinks tell a search engine where you are, and that you’re important. Have a lot of backlinks that are coming from bad sites? This is going to tell Google that you’re not a great bet for searchers. Have a decent amount of backlinks coming in from good sites that are actually relevant to what you’re selling? This is going to tell Google that you’re someone who knows what they’re doing.

Optimise Your Content – Optimising your content is important; this means finding the right keyword density for your keywords (if you don’t know what keywords you need, you should hire an SEO consultant who can help you find the right keywords fast). Good keyword densities are 1-2 times per 100 words; if you’re selling pipe cleaner monkeys, you’ll want to mention the keyword “pipe cleaner monkey” once every 100 words to show Google that you’re talking about pipe cleaner monkeys and a relevant source for people looking to buy or find out more about pipe cleaner monkeys.

Understanding how the search engines index your content and weigh your website against your SERP is the first step towards making sure your website does well and people can find you!