Small Business SEO:

A Small Business Survival Guide to the Search Engines

SEO is an industry that seems very mysterious to those who are not in it. Most small business owners don’t even know what we’re talking about when we tell them, “we’re in SEO.”

So here is a brief explanation. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the process by which you let Google and the other search engines know that your website should be #1 in the search results for a certain keyword phrase.

If you are new to all this you may have some questions.

1. Don’t Google and the other Search Engines charge for high rankings?

2. Are you talking about the listings along the right side of the search engines?

3. How can my site possibly get to number 1 when there are so many other sites out there?

4. Is it really possible for my site to be number 1?

Before we answer all those questions for you, let’s take a few minutes to break down SEO a bit. Once you get past the jargon, it really isn’t too difficult to understand.

The 2 Kinds of SEO

SEO can be broken down into 2 different types. On-Page and Off-Page. Each type is exactly as described. On-page SEO takes place on your website and refers to the things you, as a webmaster, can do to your site, in order to make sure the search engines know what keywords are relevant to the site.

Off-page SEO refers to things you can do that will help your search engine rankings, but occur off your website. Off-page SEO includes activities like link building, article writing, building web 2.0 properties and social bookmarking. Off-page SEO is the process where you get other sites to promote your site by linking to it. Each time you get a link, it’s like getting a vote for your website. The more votes you get, the higher you climb the search engine results. And the more relevant your links are to the keyword phrase, the more that link will do for your rankings.

SEO – Digging Deeper

Let’s take a more in-depth look into a few of those jargon words I warned you about above. First we have “keyword phrase” or simply “keyword.” The definition of these terms for SEO purposes is simple: the word or words that internet surfers type into the search engines. Have you ever run a Google search? Of course you have! Whatever you typed into the search bar would be the keyword or keyword phrase. You can find out what web searchers are typing into Google and other search engines with a variety of tools. There is Google’s own Keyword Tool. Other free services like Wordtracker and Market Samurai. We use Market Samurai because of its versatility and power. It has a phenomenal free trial you can check out by clicking here. But for right now, all you need to know is that the term keyword refers to the phrase people are typing into the search bar of search engines like Google.

Another term used above you are probably familiar with but not in the “SEO” sense is relevance. We mention it a couple of times above because it is a very important concept in SEO. You see, search engines like Google are trying to return the most relevant sites to the keyword phrase back to the web searcher. If you prefer Google over Bing or vice versa, it is most likely because you find the results they return, the most relevant to your query. Search engines have built their business on the concept of returning relevant results so relevance is key to proper search engine optimization.

How to Build an SEO Campaign

When implementing an SEO campaign you need to think of relevance in two major ways. First, the content on your site needs to be relevant to the keyword phrases that you want to rank for. If you are trying to rank for the term “comfort bikes” you need to make sure that your site lets the search engines know that it is about comfort bikes.

The other sense of the term relevance refers to the websites you try to get links from. When optimizing a site you need to get links from other sites. There is no other way to do it. And these links are of the most benefit when they are on sites that are relevant to the keyword phrase you are trying to rank for. So if you are trying to rank for comfort bikes it is best to get links from websites that are about bicycles, cycling and exercise. The more relevant the better.

Now that you have these jargon terms down why don’t we take a look at some of the terminology for off-page SEO activities? Let’s first look at Social Bookmarking.

Have you ever used a bookmarking service like StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious or Google Bookmarks? These are all social bookmarking sites. Basically they allow the user to bookmark a site for easy reference later. The difference between these sites and the regular bookmark tool in your web browser (Internet Explorer or Firefox) is that it is done online and you can access your bookmarks from any computer in the world. That is a nice feature for web users but it also provides these websites with a tremendous amount of data. Now the search engines know what site people are bookmarking and returning too. If someone bookmarks a site, it stands to reason that they found it valuable. Search engines are glad to know this and look to the social bookmarking sites for valuable, relevant websites to return in their results. Social bookmarking your site also has the added benefit of providing a link back to your site.

The term web 2.0 came into the popular lexicon around 2007. It refers to a shift that happened on the internet where people no longer only consumed content on the net but also became creators of content for others to consume. Examples of popular web 2.0 properties include YouTube, HubPages, Tumblr, EzineArticles, Squidoo and any blog on the internet. Regular internet users became content producers by writing blogs, uploading videos and connecting with friends. The power of web 2.0 properties for SEO lays in the ability to control the content and link back to websites of interest. When you build a web 2.0 property that is relevant to your keyword and then link back to your main website, you have gained a valuable, relevant back-link.

Article Writing is a form of web 2.0 content. It is now possible to write articles, on any topic you can imagine, and submit them to various relevant article directories. While some SEOs will tell you that article writing for SEO purposes is dead, we believe that if it is done correctly, it can lay the proper foundation for a successful SEO campaign. Article writing alone will not get you to the top of the search engines like it would have 10 years ago. But if you were to write a relevant article to your market, fill it with valuable information for your customers, use it to establish yourself as an expert in your field and have proper back-links back to your site, how could it not benefit your SEO.

Hang in There…The Key to Successful SEO is Next

Do you need a break yet? Too much reading for you? You can do it….we’re almost home. Grab a cup of coffee and get through the rest because we are about to break down the most beneficial SEO activity on the planet.

This last bit of jargon you need to understand is link-building. This is the process of acquiring back-links to your website. You may have noticed that all of the above activities are in some way a means to getting a link back to your site. There are hundreds of ways to get those all important links and you need to make sure you are getting the right kind of links. But there is no way around this simple SEO Truth – You need back-links if your site is ever going to top the rankings for your keyword term.

In addition to the activities above you could gain backlinks by starting a blog, e-mailing webmasters, creating an info-graphic, getting re-tweets and facebook likes to your page, creating linkable content…. the list goes on and on. But do not be overwhelmed. The activities laid out above are a great start. They should put you ahead of at least 90% of your competition.

I’ll dive into both types of SEO (on page and off page) and more linkbuilding activities a bit deeper in an upcoming blog post series, but before we show you exactly how to get your rankings, I want to make sure we’ll all on the same page and answer the questions that were laid out above. (Remember those….sorry, I know this is a long post)

Your SEO Questions Answered

Let’s look at them one-by-one:

1. Doesn’t Google charge for high rankings?

A. Absolutely not. Not in the organic listings anyway. Organic listings are the main set of rankings. These are the rankings that you are used to reading and referring to. They are the main listings and you can only get ranked in the organic listings by implementing a proper SEO campaign. Check out this screen shot to see exactly what is meant by organic listings:

2. Are you talking about the listings along the right side of the search engine results?

A.  No. As you can see by the screenshot above, the organic listing appear in the center of the screen. The results along the right rail are called Adwords and those results do cost money. Businesses bid on their ads and Google places them in order based on their bids and their relevance. It costs the business owner a certain amount of money (depending on the keyword that was bid on) each time a web surfer clicks the ad. SEO does not refer to these (PPC) pay-per-click ads.

3. How can my site get to number 1 when there are so many other sites on the internet?

A. Well, get started working on the things we talk about in this blog post and you are on your way. SEO is an art and a science. It has to adapt to changes in the search engine’s algorithms and do everything possible to establish a site’s relevance in the eyes of the search engines. Not many businesses know how to do this. So while there might be lots of sites out there, not too many of them know what they are doing when it comes to SEO. If you follow the advice here and in our upcoming series on the 3 Steps to More Exposure, More Customers and Online Marketing Success – you will be light years ahead of your competition and you will be able to get to the top of the search engines.

4. Is it really possible for my site to get ranked number 1?

A. Absolutely! As a matter of fact, in the screenshot above that is our site in the number one spot. We used to own thecomfortbikeshop.com. It was a business built totally around our ability to get to the top of the search engines. We built an e-commerce store and ranked it for keywords with commercial intent where we knew that people typing in those keywords were looking to buy a bike. Follow our lead and we’ll get your site to the top of GOOGLE too!

To learn more about how to get your site to number 1 subscribe to our RSS feed or our blog feed via e-mail  and you’ll be sure to get the most of our SEO education.

Till next time….