SEO for Businesses
SEO what you need to know – Businesses online certainly need to know everything they can about SEO if there is to be any chance of success in their marketing endeavors and ranking highly in search engines. Almost all businesses now days employ a website as an important part of their marketing strategy. If your business lacks a good understanding of search engine optimisation then chances are you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
Search engine optimisation and effective search engine marketing need not be difficult and essentially there are only a couple of things that businesses need to keep in mind when approaching the subject.
What every business should know about SEO
Indeed there are a couple of things that businesses need to know about SEO before even thinking about jumping in on the online marketing bandwagon. For one thing, businesses should know that keywords are the foundation of a good search engine optimisation campaign. Search engines rely on keywords to find and index websites and its important for business websites to possess the best possible keyword for their website if prospects are to find them at all!
The first step to good search engine optimisation is to therefore figure out which terms or phrases your prospects are likely to use when looking for information about your products or services online. This process is known as keyword research and can be effectively accomplished using tools like Google’s Keyword Tool. Chosen keywords need to be relevant and ideally has a lot of monthly searches with reasonable competition.
In terms of usage, at least five keywords should be sufficient in getting your online marketing website optimised. Too much and it will lower quality and hurt whatever chances your website had for good search engine rankings. These keywords also need to be strategically used throughout various elements of your website which includes content, headings, titles and its even a good idea to have it on your domain name.
Another thing that businesses need to know about SEO is site map. When we think of search engines we often think about Google right away which isn’t really surprising considering that it’s the dominant search engine on the Internet. What sets Google apart from other search engines is its distinctive features the most significant of which is the site map!
Site map is important to SEO because it’s a feature that enables Google to more effectively index your website when seeking out new content. Site maps are only visible to search engine algorithms under the xml format and allows for better search engine rankings compared to others that don’t have it. Site maps also signals search engines every time your website is updated allowing it to be crawled and indexed a lot more often.
Simply put, businesses need to make sure that they have a sitemap on their website if only for the reason that Google uses it to assess website structure and provide users with relevant and updated content which is certainly important for effective search engine optimization. After all, search engine marketing is ultimately about getting found, ranked and indexed better than that of your competitors.
Last and perhaps the most important in our list of what people ought to know about SEO is that “Content is King”. You’ve probably hear people in the search engine marketing business say it all the time and for good reason!
Content is what ultimately drives success in search engine optimization and simply because its not just about giving prospects the information that they really need but it also determines the quality and profitability of the traffic search engines sends your way.
Your website content needs to be:
- SEO friendly which mean sitemaps and good carefully selected keywords
- Useful and informative
- Interesting and engaging enough to make people stay
Think about it – will you buy anything off a brochure or sales letter that appears uninteresting and riddled with errors that it hardly makes any sense? It’s the same thing with business websites and with no good content, a search engine optimization campaign is doomed to fail.
Make no mistake, SEO is a tedious and complex subject to tackle but get the basics right and you’ll build a solid foundation for your online business making things easier and ultimately a lot more profitable!
