The Importance of SEO to Small Businesses

Posted by admin

April 9, 2008

Search engine optimisation is becoming increasingly important for the success of small businesses today. Recent trends indicate that the internet is replacing traditional media as the leading source of information and E-Commerce is replacing high street retail as the leading sales channel. Search engine marketing is particularly important for a small business as costs involved are often lower than implementing a nationwide or even a local marketing campaign using traditional methods of marketing such as print media or advertisements in niche publications within the industry. In addition to search engine marketing offering a higher return on investment, the recent trends in consumer behaviour indicate that intact search engines have a wider reach than even television in some market sectors.

Search engines also provide small businesses with a common platform to compete effectively with established corporations. Effective Search Engine Optimisation can enable small business owners to compete for products and services with larger companies; something which would not be possible in traditional media. The emergence of Search engines has thus been a major boost for small businesses.

The ultimate goal of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is to get visitors to your website. Search engine optimisation can bring highly targeted traffic to your website form search engines when users search for your products and services.

There is a tough competition to in the world but only 10 can appear on the first page of a search engine like Google for a particular search phrase. Search engine studies have shown that if a Web site does not rank among the top 15 of a search result, chances are it will not get noticed and subsequently not generate any traffic to the website.

Here are some search engine optimisation tips for small businesses

Create a simple but clear and professional Web site. Your website is the first impression or your business so it is important for your website to be professionally designed.

Organise content. The information on the website should not be cluttered. Information should be categorised meaningfully and content should be appropriately categorised into different sub pages of the website. If users fail to find what they want immediately, they are likely to go to another site.

Position your keywords correctly. In addition to selecting the right keywords for your website, positioning them strategically within your content is crucial. The main keywords should be in the title, description and within the body.

Distribute your keywords strategically. This is a basic SEO technique. Position keywords or key phrases at the start and the end of the document as the beginning and end of a page is given more weight by search engines while searching. Keyword density is also important. Keyword density refers to how many times the keyword appears in a web page. E.g. a density of around 2-5% is considered good. This is 12 repetitions in 400 words.

Your keywords should be a part of the link texts. Another effective SEO technique is including keywords in text links that you use in your pages. Instead of using “Click here for more info” as your link texts, mention your keywords instead.” The use of keywords is the link text has a positive impact on SEO.

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