Off-Page Optimisation

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

If you have followed the last few chapters of this guide you should now have a better idea of how to develop and format content for your website. This formatting of your content is known as on-page optimisation. However, for web pages to rank well on Google and other engines, you need to build trust and popularity. To do this you need to employ a variety of off-page optimisation techniques (so called because the optimisation work does not involve directly editing the HTML or content of your web pages). Off-page optimisation aims to generate links from other trustworthy, relevant and popular third party web pages back to your website. This link-building process is fundamentally the most important element of SEO. However, link-building is also one of the trickiest and time consuming parts of the SEO process. For bigger businesses this process is made inevitably easier as a result of large budgets for online and offline PR, promotions and general marketing. Bigger businesses may also employ large teams of marketing staff to execute the “linkable” creative. Small business SEO, on the other hand, may be hampered by smaller budgets and limited human resources. This chapter of my guide offers general advice on the kinds of links that need to be sourced and the tactics small businesses can employ to attract inbound links and improve search engine placement. This article follows on from Part Seventeen: Optimising META Titles & Descriptions. To go back to the start of this guide you can read my Introduction.

General Guidelines

Some key considerations to remember when sourcing links for your website:

• Don’t purchase links for PageRank (from here on referred to as PR).
• Always aim to develop trust and relevancy. A link to your website from a web page about fishing is not relevant when your web page is all about how to purchase cheap 2nd hand cars.
• Use link analysis tools such as Open Site Explorer to determine the domain and page authority of the web page you hope to secure a link from. This will help you to assess the trust of a particular site.
• If you do purchase or rent links (be aware that Google officially frowns upon “paid links”), ensure that you use natural and varied link anchor text. If your brand new website is all about used cars and all of sudden there are 1,000 links pointing at your site all using the words “used cars” to link to you, this is likely to result in a penalty.
• Use local and long-tail key-phrases in your anchor text. Encourage natural looking links to your site too (“click here” and “this great site” look more natural than very specific search terms).
• Links within content are much more valuable than links on the footer, blogroll or links page of an external website.
• Links from a web page where you are the only recipient of a link is far more valuable than a link from a web page that also links to 100 of your competitors.
• Ensure that you don’t secure links on web pages that also link out to completely irrelevant or SPAMMY websites. This will contribute to placing you in a “bad neighbourhood”, also known as bad co-citation.
• Avoid reciprocal linking with low quality sites. However, reciprocal links are not a bad thing per se. Reciprocal links are fine if they are with trusted, authority sites and put you in a “good neighbourhood”.
• Think about the user experience. Does a link from a certain web page back to your website help the user to find what they are looking for?
• Promote your quality content as much as possible – over time this will generate natural, authority links.

Small Business Link Building Strategies

Link-building for small businesses is a question of finance and human resources. Most small businesses do not have unlimited budgets for marketing, promotions and PR. Smart small business link building strategies therefore need to place emphasis on what’s unique and compelling about their online proposition. This together with a careful consideration of your budget and human resources will help you to determine your off-page optimisation strategy. Here are a selection of options:

• Think Big, Start Small – Small businesses need to think big by keeping high traffic, competitive key-phrases in mind as long-term targets. Use your key-phrase strategy, as discussed in part nine of this guide, to determine your link-building strategy. Start small by targeting lower competition long-tail or local search terms (“cheap pizza delivery Brighton”, for example). Ensure that your individual web pages offer a high degree of relevancy to these specific searches by following the on-page optimisation techniques discussed in parts fifteen to seventeen.
• Niche Networking – An inexpensive way for small businesses to get the word out about their services is to network via phone, email and comments boards with other webmasters and users. Draw up an exhaustive list of websites, blogs, review sites, forums and directories that relate in theme to your website. Comment on other authority sites and engage in conversations. Link out to authority websites. Offer to write a review of an authority site on your blog. Ask nicely if they’d be prepared to comment or review your unique content. Explain what’s so good and unique about what you have to offer.
• Hosted Content – As mentioned in the general guidelines, links within content are amongst the most powerful you can receive (if they connect to your site from a trusted domain). Use your networking skills and powers of persuasion (you don’t necessarily have to offer payment) to convince other trusted websites and blogs to host a well-written piece of your content on their website.
• Directory Submission – Another relatively inexpensive way for small businesses to generate some trusted inbound links. The key is to ensure that you only submit your site to high quality, human edited directories. Niche or local directories can be even more valuable. Avoid submitting your site to hundreds of low quality directories.
• Chase Competitor Links – If a website links to one of your competitor’s websites, the chances are they may well be prepared to link to you. Chase as many of your competitor’s links as possible; the more you can get the more likely you are to rank or outrank your competitor. Link Diagnosis and Open Site Explorer are two great, free tools you can use to carry out this work. Be aware that Link Diagnosis assesses links in terms of PR, which is no longer an entirely reliable method for assessing the potential of a link.
• Offer Things for Free – A great way to attract links is to offer things for free or at a discount. This could be free information, a download or e-book, a gift or voucher. The crucial key here is to drive your incentive online and to make your offer genuinely engaging and compelling. Use email, viral and word of mouth marketing to get your offer out there and ensure that your website is set-up to encourage “linkability” and sharing through social media bookmarks and incentives to link to you.
• Viral Marketing – Viral marketing can be a relatively cheap way for small businesses to drive high volumes of traffic when deployed correctly. Often simple and amusing ideas can capture people’s attention and result in links back to your website. Devising an original computer game or video might be a more expensive option, but if the quality and the delivery of the content is of a high enough standard it will deliver both traffic and links.
• Social Media and Online PR – Devise a cunning marketing strategy to get people talking about you online (more on this in the next chapter).
• Offline Marketing and PR – Devise an offline strategy aimed at driving people to your website (again, more on this later).

Off-page Optimisation Checklist

• Follow the general guidelines above when conducting link research
• Small businesses need to be realistic with their link building objectives
• Network, communicate and be create with your off-page strategy

Part Nineteen

These are just a few methods and strategies that small businesses can employ to increase links and improve their SEO performance. In the next chapter I will look at another area of off-page optimisation in more detail – social media optimisation.

META Titles & Descriptions

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

Research carried out by SEOmoz indicates that the majority of SEO professionals still consider the use of key-phrases in META title tags to be the most important on-page element for optimising your content. Following on from Chapter Sixteen: Content Generation & Formatting, this chapter of my small business SEO guide looks at best practice techniques for optimising your META titles and descriptions. To go back to the start of this guide you can read my introduction.

META Title Optimisation

In the last chapter I discussed the importance of using your key-phrase research to determine a content generation plan based on quality and “linkability”. Prior to publishing your content, there are two more elements to consider: these are the META title and description tags. Following on my On-Page Optimisation Overview, here are some more key considerations for optimising your META titles:

• Consider the purpose and aims of your content when determining your META title and integrating your one main key-phrase. If your page advertises a very specific product then include the exact product specification plus an incentive to purchase. Exact product specifications are another way to target the “long-tail” as discussed in part nine.
• As discussed in the previous chapter, ensure that the main key-phrase used in your META title also appears in your on-page copy and page mark-up such as your H1 tags.
• Some small business owners may wish to develop a brand identity within their particular niche by adding their company name to each META title. If you choose to do this, best practice would be to add this to the far right of the title. For example, “Bike Repairs in Eastbourne | Mike’s Bikes”. This title ensures that the weight is given to the main target key-phrase “Bike Repairs” first, the long-tail target “Bike Repairs in Eastbourne” second and the brand name third.
• Use the pipe or dash symbols to break up your title content, if necessary. This can enable you be quite specific about the nature of your page content. For example “Bike Repairs – How to Fix Gears | Mike’s Bikes”.
• Limit your titles to less than 65 characters to ensure that it is not truncated by the search engines.
• Don’t repeat your key-phrases over and over again. For example, “Bike Repairs | Bike Repairs Eastbourne | Bicycle Repairs | Cycle Repairs”. This isn’t appealing to search engine users and search engines won’t like it either.
• Try and entice search engine users with what’s unique about your web page content. For example, “Fast Bicycle Repairs in Eastbourne | 24 Hour Service”.
• Be creative and with your content and titles – when both of these elements are well thought through and executed, your click-through rate and conversions will increase significantly.

Meta Description Optimisation

To avoid the search engines randomly displaying text from the body copy of your document you can write a META description that contains the specific content, key-phrases and incentives that you want search engine users to see. Here are some key considerations for optimising META descriptions:

• Ensure that your description is not a straight copy of the META title tag. This could be construed as keyword stuffing.
• Ensure that your description uses exact phrases and sentences used in your body copy to ensure a high tag to page content relevancy.
• Include your sales messages and call-to-actions in your description tag. Again, this will improve your click-through and conversion rates.
• Limit the copy for your description to 150 characters to ensure that it is not truncated by the search engines.
• Incorporate synonyms and phrase variants into your description copy. Again, this helps reduce the risk of keyword stuffing.

The keyword META tag is now obsolete so you don’t need to include this. Small business owners should be aware that writing great titles and descriptions will not immediately transform your website into an overnight success. Once your content is published, you need to promote it and gain trust and popularity for it via a number of off-page optimisation factors. These off-page factors will be the focus of the next three chapters.

Title and Description Checklist

• Take time to consider the structure of your page titles and descriptions
• Include powerful sales messages and benefits of viewing your content
• The meta keywords tag is now obsolete – don’t bother adding this

Part Eighteen

The next chapter of this guide will look at the crucial off-page process of link-building paying particular attention to ethical methods small business owners can employ to increase the “linkability” and SEO potential of their sites. Click here to go to part eighteen.

Content Generation & Formatting

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

As mentioned in previous chapters of this guide, content development is one of the key cornerstones to successful search engine optimisation. However, filling your brand new website with endless pages of poorly written content or, worse still, content copied directly from other websites, will not help you to secure link popularity with web users or trust with the search engines. Following on from Part Fifteen: On-page Optimisation Overview, this chapter of my step-by-step guide to small business SEO looks specifically at the on-page topic of generating & formatting content for your site and how small business owners can maximise the potential of new sites by developing content tailored to a specific niche. To go back to the start of this guide you can read my Introduction.

Generating Useful, Targeted Content

If you have followed this guide from the beginning, you should by now have established through your key-phrase research an extensive list of “head”, “long-tail” and “local” search term targets. Each of these key-phrase terms should be unique although connected to your “head” key-phrase theme or “niche”. The next stage for your web development process should be to put in place a content generation plan with the aim of gradually increasing the volume of genuinely useful web pages that individually target your unique key-phrases.

Content generation and link-building are without doubt the two most important elements of SEO. If you don’t provide your website users with useful, engaging, informative, unique, newsworthy, intelligent or amusing content, you will not be able to entice people to link to you naturally. Authority sites will almost never link naturally to a site that does not provide at least one of these qualities, and authority links are the ones that count! (More on link-building and determining link authority in part eighteen).

Small business start-ups need to give a lot of thought to the presentation and delivery of content on their new websites. What differentiates your content from what can be found elsewhere on the web? What style and tone of writing are you employing to appeal to your target market? What is the purpose of your content, is it simply to drive sales enquiries or to build credibility as an authority on your subject?

Formatting Your Content

Once you have considered these questions and determined your content generation plan you next need to write the content itself, format it and publish it on your website. Many big businesses employ experienced SEO copywriters and engineers to do this work, however, some small business owners may wish to develop this process in-house to keep development costs as low as possible. Should you decide to do this there are several things you should consider when writing and formatting your web copy:

• Target just one key-phrase per web page. Don’t over-use this key-phrase but ensure it flows throughout the document.
• Use synonyms and phrase variants throughout your copy. An intelligent, well-structured piece of writing should do this anyway.
• The search engines still pay attention to the text within your H1 tags. Ensure that your H1 titles accurately convey the content of your page and re-iterate the text within your H1 title in your opening paragraph.
• Be cautious using bold, italics and underlined tags. Use sparingly to highlight relevant target key-phrases but don’t highlight every instance of the same key-phrase.
• Cross-link to other pages within your site. This encourages users to explore related content and helps search engines crawl and index your site more effectively.
• Link out to authority sites. Links from your site to other established, trustworthy sites will help to place you in the “right neighbourhood”.
• Consider content velocity. Take care with the rate at which you add new pages to your site. A steady, daily or weekly addition of web pages is preferable to sudden spikes or lulls.
• Avoid cloaking and spamming techniques such as keyword stuffing.

Content Checklist

• Always aim to generate useful content aimed at your customers at users
• Create a content development plan – essential for growing your site traffic
• Follow the formatting tips above everytime you publish new content

Part Seventeen

This chapter has covered some of the questions small businesses should consider when developing a content generation plan plus the key elements to formatting content for the web. The next chapter will look at some advanced techniques for optimising title and description META tags. Click here to go to part seventeen.

On-Page Optimisation Overview

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

In the last chapter to this guide I referenced the importance of ensuring that unique META title tags are written for each individual web page on your site before it launches. Adding META titles is one element of what’s commonly referred to as “on-page optimisation”. On-page optimisation is essentially the process of tweaking HTML mark-up and page content in order to increase the potential for higher search rankings. This is in contrast to “off-page” optimisation techniques such as link-bait promotion. On-page optimisation should be given considerable focus by small business website owners especially in the immediate few months after a new website launches. As a result, the next few stages of this guide will be dedicated to on-page optimisation techniques, beginning here with an overview of the key elements. This article follows on from Part Fourteen: Launching New Websites. To go back to the start of this guide you can read my introduction here.

General Guidelines

If you choose to add or optimise content on your website yourself, there are several key things to consider.

• The content written for each individual web page on your site should be informed by thorough key-phrase research (as referenced in parts five and nine of this guide).
• Use your homepage for your “head” key-phrases (your high volume, high quality, long-term targets).
• Each web page should be optimised for one key phrase term. A high relevance for one key-phrase is far better than a moderate relevance for several.
• Ensure that your web copy matches and fits coherently with the key-phrase term you are optimising for.
• Be careful not to over-optimise. Avoid “stuffing” your web copy and META tags with too many instances of your target key-phrases.

Meta Tags

• Write unique META titles and descriptions for each individual web page on your site.
• Ensure that your META title and description tag is appealing to human beings and accurately conveys the nature of your page content.
• Include your target key-phrase in your META title and description tags.
• Avoid over-long META titles, 65 characters should be the limit.
• Use target key-phrases to the left of your title tag, your company name should appear on the right.
• Remember that the META description tag does not help you to rank higher in the search engines. However a well-written description will assit you with your CTR (click-through-rate), so ensure that your key selling points are included.

Body Copy and HTML tags

• Consider limiting the copy for each page on your website to around 300 to 500 words. This is a more manageable size of text for achieving key-phrase or “keyword density”.
• Do not fuss too much about keyword density. Focus instead on ensuring that your target key-phrase flows and fits naturally into the content.
• Include the target key-phrase near the top of the body copy, ideally in the first sentence.
• Integrate the target key-phrase into your main heading. Make use of subheadings and include different key-phrases in each sub-heading.
• Use the H1 tag for your main headings.
• Be cautious using HTML tags such as bold and italic. Don’t overuse them solely on your target key-phrase.
• Use synonyms and phrase variants throughout your body copy. This reduces the risk of keyword stuffing having a negative impact on page relevance through the use of words related to your key-phrase.
• Repeat your main key-phrase at the end of your copy.
• Most importantly of all, make sure you write good quality, useful content that offers the person visting your site information, prices, advice or ideas specifically related to what they searched for. All ethical SEO projects should aim to deliver a quality on-page experience for the user.

Internal Links

• Use your target key-phrase as the anchor text in your page hyperlinks. Where possible, avoid using neutral terms such as “click here”. Apply the same rule when linking out to third party sites.
• Create page and menu titles that include your target key-phrases.

Images

• Optimise your images with relevant titles, Alt text, and file names.
• Again be careful not to over-optimise your image tags.
• Bigger images tend to feature more prominently on the first page of Google’s image search results.

Review

• Conduct continuing reviews of your web pages to assess visual impact, usability and relevance. Implement calls to action and incentives to explore other pages on your site.

On-Page Optimisation Checklist

• Your earlier key-phrase research must inform your on-page optimisation
• Ensure each individual web page on your site is optimised following these guidelines
• Pay considerable attention to the title tags of your pages
• Provide your customers or users with great content!

Part Sixteen

This overview of on-page optimisation factors is intended to outline the key considerations when creating content for the web with both users and search engines in mind. Start-up companies and small business websites can start to maximise on the potential to drive qualified traffic to their sites through the provision of highly targeted, niche content. In the next few chapters I will look at on-page factors in more detail. Click here to go to part sixteen.

Launching New Websites

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

So far my SEO guide has covered all of the steps that small businesses need to take before a website goes live. The fact this is now the fourteenth chapter gives some indication of the importance and precedence that should be given to SEO planning and preparation. I hope that, so far, I have shown how small business SEO strategies can be reasonably cost-effective to implement; dependant, of course, on how much of the process you choose to develop in-house and how much you outsource to an agency or consultant. Launching new websites doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive for smaller businesses, but preparation and planning is essential. As a result, it would be useful to recap here the stages taken so far plus an outline of the final considerations before you launch your site. This article follows on from Part Thirteen: Sitemaps. To go back to the start of my guide click here.

Overview of SEO Planning

Small businesses and internet start-ups planning on launching a website for the first time should give consideration to the following steps. The links within each step point back to the relevant sections of this guide.

1. Choose a reputable web hosting company
2. Choose a domain name for your business
3. Define your SEO Planning model
4. Define your key-phrase integration and website design brief carefully
5. Ensure that site architecture directives are central to your website build
6. Ensure that you implement an SEO friendly content management system
7. Consider WordPress as a cost-effective CMS for small business SEO
8. Conduct thorough key-phrase research before you brief a web designer
9. Target long-tail and local search key-phrases for short term wins
10. Conduct competitor analysis before committing to a key-phrase strategy
11. Install effective web analytics on your website
12. Install a sitemap on your website

Final Considerations

Also give some thought to the following before launching new websites:

1. Technical. Ensure you have given unique META titles and descriptions to all of your web pages (more on this in the next few chapters). Also ensure that you are happy with the URL structure of your main pages. Once your site launches you may start to receive inbound links straight away (depending upon how much you’ve invested in general marketing). Changing your URL structures at a later date means implementing page 301 redirects.
2. Offline Marketing. SEO is not just about technical adjustments to your website, content development and link-building. Really effective SEO strategies are ones that are integrated with your other marketing activities. Before your website launches, give some thought to your offline marketing. Press advertisements, flyers, posters and outdoor media should encourage people not only to visit your website but to engage with and share it. If you offer great, free content on your site, make sure this is clear in your offline promotions. Encourage people to sign-up, share or comment on your website content. This will help you to build “natural” links into your site. Although small business budgets can be prohibitive, you should avoid the trap of focusing all your efforts online. Targeted offline campaigns such as flyering, need not be overly expensive.
3. Public Relations. Again, give some thought to how you intend to “announce” your site to the world. Draw up a list of press and industry targets that are most likely to show some interest in your niche. Devise a range of unique and eye-catching press releases featuring genuinely newsworthy or topical information (a press release simply stating that your new website is now online will get you nowhere). Make sure you follow up your press release distribution with phone calls to the journalists, editors and industry professionals that you have targeted. Consider using a site announcement service such as Eric Ward’s URLwire.com. Also give thought to on-going online and offline PR campaigns (this could be a whole guide to itself, so perhaps visit the Chartered Institute of Public Relations for further advice).
4. Social Media Engagement. Consider setting up accounts on major social networking sites, video sharing sites and content syndication portals. Enable your site visitors to follow you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other popular social media channels. Enable people to comment on your blog and sign-up for your updates. Link out to other related bloggers and established, authority sites. I will cover more on social media in a later chapter.
5. Maintenance Strategy. Make sure you have a plan in place for content development, general marketing, public relations, link building and general web development. Once your site is online you will need to work hard to build its profile and credibility. Good SEO results will not occur without on-going work and maintenance.

Launching New Websites Checklist

• Ensure that you’ve considered and/or implemented all the recommended SEO planning stages
• Make sure you’re happy with the technical set-up of your site prior to launch
• Remember to integrate your SEO objectives with your other marketing activities
• Ensure that you have a website development plan in place that will keep your site fresh, relevant and up-to-date

Part Fifteen

In part fifteen I will offer an overview of the on-page optimisation techniques that you can implement once your website has launched. SEO requires a lot of minor tweaks and on-going adjustments. The next few chapters of this guide will cover the key areas for improvement. Click here to go to part fifteen.

Sitemaps

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

Small business websites and internet start-ups need to consider content development as part of their SEO strategy. Crucially, you need to ensure that your site content can be crawled and indexed efficiently. One method to assist with this is to make use of a sitemap. This section of my guide looks at sitemaps for SEO; considering the reasons why you should implement one before your website launches. This article follows on from Part Twelve: Web Analytics. To go back to the start of my guide click here.

Generating Sitemaps

You can generate a sitemap using a free service such as the one offered by XML-sitemaps.com. You will need to set-up a Google Webmaster Account to implement this (which will require you to add some custom code to your header file). Alternatively, if you are using a content management system such as WordPress, you can use a Google Sitemap plug-in.

Although sitemaps won’t necessarily improve your rankings for existing pages, they can enable more of your pages to be indexed and can help to determine how often search engine robots come to visit your site. This enables you to:

• Reduce the discrepancy between actual pages that exist on your site against actual pages indexed by Google (reducing the time you might spend running “site:” and “inurl:” syntax searches as mentioned in Part Eleven: Competitor Benchmarking).
• Monitor pages that Google is unable to crawl and implement the necessary changes required to correct this.
• Specify relative precedence of pages within your site on a priority scale of 0 to 1 allowing you to indicate preferential pages for index inclusion.
• Specify crawl frequency for page types and categories (although the robots will not necessarily follow these instructions).

Generating a sitemap is one of the final technical considerations that small business owners should be aware of before preparing to launch a new company or e-commerce website with SEO on the agenda. The remainder of this guide will now be focused on the tasks and techniques that can be implemented once your website has launched. This includes “on-page” SEO factors for improving your site content plus “off-page” strategies such as link-building, offline promotions and social media engagement.

Sitemaps for SEO Checklist

• Install a sitemap prior to your website’s launch
• Configure your sitemap to specify preferences
• Monitor your page’s after your site launch to check for any crawling or indexation issues

Part Fourteen

In part fourteen I will cover some of the final preparations that need to be made before a new website goes live whilst also recapping the steps taken so far to reach this point. Click here to go to part fourteen.

Web Analytics and SEO

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

One of the final tasks that small business owners need to complete before launching a new company website or e-commerce business is to ensure that an adequate web analytics solution is set-up. So, in this stage of my guide, I will look at the analytics options available, the tasks to set when monitoring website activity and ways to use web analytics data to improve your performance in the search engines. This article follows on from Part Eleven: Competitor Benchmarking. To go back to the start of my guide click here.

Web Analytics for Small Business

Installing a web analytics solution on your site is crucial for numerous reasons. You need to be able to track not only the volume of visitors your site receives but also other crucial metrics and information such as how long your visitors spend on your site, what key-phrases people use to find you, where your visitors come from (for example, via Google referrals or third party websites) and which of your site pages appear to be most successful at converting visits into sales or enquiries. Bigger businesses require more complex solutions to monitor their site activity. For sites with 100,000+ visitors per year, paid solutions such as Coremetrics or Webtrends are recommended. For many small businesses an investment in a paid solution is not essential or necessary. However, installing a web analytics solution of some sort is an absolute must. Two of the most popular free options are Google Analytics and Statcounter (although the latter is only free for a “basic” level of service). Both of these analytics tools are essential for equipping small business owners with the information necessary to improve SEO performance.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is easy to install, especially if you use a Content Management System such as WordPress (where you can utilise a plug-in such as this one to add the tracking code to all your web pages). Once Google Analytics is installed and you have started to experience site traffic you need monitor the following:

• Your Dashboard. This gives you an overview of key metrics such as unique visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time spent on your site and percentage of new visits. Pay close attention to your site average bounce rate. If it’s over 60% this suggests that there is a serious problem with either your site content and its relevancy or your site design and navigation. This is not good for your long-term SEO! You should aim to keep your bounce rate under 40%. Under 30% and you’re in a good place.
• Monitor Your Visitors Overview. This panel offers technical profile data such as which browsers people use to view your site. If there is a particularly high bounce rate associated with a certain browser, run some tests to find out if that browser is displaying your site correctly. Poorly displayed sites will lead to higher bounce rates so you need to ensure cross-browser consistency.
• Monitor Your Traffic Sources Overview. This panel is the most useful for viewing a snapshot of your SEO performance. Are you receiving any traffic for the target key-phrases you are optimising your site for? If not, why not? If you are, which pages are your visitors landing on, which pages do they go onto view and how long are they spending on your site? Use Google Analytics to explore these questions and figure out ways to improve your visitors’ experience and journey through your site. For example, if you find a particular landing page has a high bounce rate, edit that page to include links to more enticing related content within your site. Look at improving the visual impact of your web pages or use more “call to actions” to engage your visitors and encourage them to participate with you or get in touch.
• Monitor Your Content Overview. This panel offers a snapshot of your best performing web pages. Use this information to assess why certain pages appear to be more successful than others. Consider the position, accessibility and importance of certain web pages for improving your conversion ratio. Pay close attention to the bounce rate of individual pages (not just your site average). Individual pages with very high bounce rates indicate that work must be done to improve their performance.
• Set-up Goals. This is possibly the most important analytics tool for monitoring your SEO process. Discover which key-phrase referrals lead to subscriptions, online purchases or enquiries via your contact form. Monitor the journey your visitors make and use this data to streamline that process.
• Use your data to improve on performance. If you discover that you rank well for a particular key-phrase, make sure you optimise your pages to exploit other, similar key-phrases within the same niche. A large proportion of your site traffic in the long-term will originate from long-tail or local search phrases, so you need to ensure that your content maximises this potential.

Web Analytics and SEO Checklist

• Install Google Analytics or your prefered solution before your site launch
• Monitor your bounce rate closely
• Monitor your landing page performance and adjust where necessary
• Make sure your pages entice visitors to look at deeper content on your site
• Use the data you receive over time to exploit other SEO opportunities

Part Thirteen

In part thirteen I will cover the topic of sitemaps and how installing a sitemap improves your website’s chances of indexation. Click here to go to part thirteen.

Competitor Benchmarking

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

So far all of the stages in this guide have covered the various processes that need to be given consideration before a new internet start-up business launches. One of the final most important things you need to do before you brief a web designer or begin the process of building your website is competitor benchmarking (carrying out analysis on your major competitors). This is another important process that will help you to define your key-phrase integration strategy as discussed in Part Five: Web Design and SEO and in Part Nine: Key-phrase Research. This article follows on from Part Ten: Targeting Local Search. To go back to the start of my guide click here.

SEO Competition Tools

In the previous two chapters I identified the long-tail and local search as ideal starting strategies for small business SEO. I discussed how tools such as Wordtracker can help you to identify high and low competition key-phrases. However, small business internet start-ups need to be aware of the multitude of factors that can give your competitors the edge in the SERPS (search engine results pages). There are in fact, at least a hundred different factors that influence search positioning, however, the following areas are of the most importance. Most of the SEO competition tools referenced here are free unless otherwise stated.

Domain & Website Age

Small business start-ups should consider buying an aged domain as established domains and websites generally perform much better in the search engines. This should also be a consideration when examining your competition. If, for example, you have identified certain key-phrases that you wish to appear high in the SERPS for, you should also check the age of the websites that also appear highly for these particular key-phrases. There are a number of ways to do this. I would advise downloading the SEO Toolbar for Firefox (you will need to install the Firefox browser to do this). This tool is loaded with an array of features including quick menu options to look-up WHOIS information and check internet web-page archives. This information will allow you to assess the history of your competitors’ sites. This can help you to make a judgement on the likelihood of securing a result for your target terms when compared against other factors such as the specific use of your target key-phrases in your competitors’ META title tags.

Volume of Pages

The depth and quality of content on a site is a very important factor in SEO and content development should be central to most small business SEO strategies. So, again, one of the steps you should take is to analyse how many of your competitors’ pages have been indexed by Google. You can do this by using the syntax “site:” To carry out an analysis of my site, for example, you would enter the following into Google or Yahoo:

site:www.jameshubbardmarketing.co.uk

The above search delivers the best performing indexed pages. This is very useful for both analysing the volume of pages indexed and the content across a site itself. Should you discover that your competitor site is extremely well-optimised on a specific key-phrase, with a large volume of quality web pages devoted to your particular key-phrase topic, you might consider either making changes to your key-phrase strategy or altering your planning to include more content development and link building.

Backlinks

Backlinks are undoubtedly the most important SEO factor of all (more detail on this in future posts). However, a starting point for competitor benchmarking is to analyse the volume, quality and trust of your competitors’ backlinks. Two excellent, free tools to assist you with this are Link Diagnosis and Open Site Explorer. These tools are especially useful as they do not just give a snapshot of the volume of links but also give an indication of crucial context values such link strength and trust. This will help you to determine the most important and relevant links that you will need to chase in order to compete in the SERPS.

PageRank & Quality of Content

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm named after Google’s Larry Page. If you have installed the SEO Toolbar for Firefox, you can view the PageRank score for a web page simply by visting that page (the score is out of 10, with 10 indicating the strongest score). However, PageRank is no longer very reliable (with Google having admitted that they sometimes attribute random PageRank to websites to confuse the process of SEO!) As an alternative, I would recommend downloading the SEOmoz Toolbar for Firefox. The free version offers a snapshot of values such as Root Domain and Page Authority. This is extremely useful information for evaluating your competitors’ sites and assessing the possibility of competing with them on your target terms. I would highly recommend becoming a fully paid up member of the SEOmoz community as their paid for tools offer greater detail and analysis (at $99.99 or about £60 per month).

META Data

Finally and, as mentioned in previous chapters, you should look at the META data of your competitors’ sites. Wordtracker is, again, an excellent tool for comparing search volumes against sites that feature specific key-phrases in their META title tags. You can also use the syntax “intitle:” to discover the best performing sites that integrate your particular target key-phrases.

Part Twelve

In part twelve I will cover one of the final processes that small business owners need to consider before launching a new website which is the installation of web analytics software. Click here to go to part twelve.

Targeting Local Search

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

Increasing numbers of people are using local search terms to find products, information or services online. Targeting local search is therefore an ideal starting strategy for many small to medium size businesses that are looking to increase their website visibility. So, for part ten of my guide to small business SEO, I will offer some advice on how to target local search more effectively. This article follows on from Part Nine: Key-phrase Research. To go back to the start of my guide click here.

Setting up for Local Search

In Part Nine of this guide I indicated the importance of identifying high and low competition key-phrases and using this research as a basis to form a key-phrase strategy. I concluded that small business SEO strategies need to be both realistic and specific with their objectives. In addition to this, small businesses also need to think about their long and short term objectives. For example, if you were to set-up a new pizza delivery company, you might wish to secure a top ten placement for the search term “pizza delivery”. However, the competition on this key-phrase will be too intense for you to achieve a result in the short term (especially if your website is brand new and you have budget limitations). Small business start-ups therefore need to “think big” but start small (the old cliché “don’t run before you can walk” might apply here). The way to “think big” in the example of the pizza company would be to set the key-phrase “pizza delivery” as your long-term target. Who knows, in a few years time you could find yourself contending with Dominos and other market leaders. So, as mentioned in Part Five: Web Design and SEO, you should build your site with the term “pizza delivery” in mind, by including this key-phrase in your navigation scheme, categories, headings, page titles and cross-links. However, don’t expect to achieve a top placement in the search engines any time soon. Instead focus your short-term objectives on low(er) competition key-phrases that sit within this key-phrase niche. One way to do this is by targeting local search.

Optimising for Local Search

There are several key things you can do to optimise for local search. These include:

• Researching and identifying local search key-phrases. A tool such as Wordtracker, for example, might help you to identify that the term “cheap pizza delivery Oxford” has low competition but a moderate volume of monthly searches.
• Optimise your homepage for your main town or target region. If the focus of your business is in Oxford, then ensure that this is clear on your homepage and contact page. If you wish to target multiple towns or regions, ensure that your homepage is optimised for the most competitive region and that the less competitive regions feature on your sub-pages.
• Don’t over-optimise your sub-pages. Stuffing your web pages with hundreds of local search terms such as “pizza delivery” followed by a city name, will not help you to generate web page quality and relevance. Instead, you should aim to create a web page for each specific town or region that you wish to target.
• Create original content for each region you target. Your individual web pages should offer as much local relevance as possible. Be specific with your on-page details and differentiate the content across your pages.
• Add your company address and phone number. Make sure you add these details to every page. Search engines are able to detect address and phone number formats and are able to cross-reference this data with its existence elsewhere on the web.
• Make sure your address and phone number matches up everywhere it is mentioned. This applies both on your website and elsewhere. Consistency of your address and contact details helps to build trust and credibility with the search engines.
• Get your website listed in local directories and on local websites. Links from geographically specific web properties such as directories or listings with your Local Chamber of Commerce will help enormously with achieving better rankings for specific local search terms.
• Use your official business name in the title tag of your contact or location page. This helps search engines to associate your business to a specific region.
• Add your business to Google Maps. Add as much information as possible to stand out. Use your target key-phrase terms in your business description and ensure that you select the appropriate business category. Submitting your site to other local directories will help optimise your listing.

This is not an exhaustive list of steps you can take to ensure you are targeting local search optimally. There are several SEO guides available that focus specifically on this topic. Two of the best are David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors and Andrew Shotland’s Local SEO Guide. However, bear in mind that both of these guides are written for the U.S market and that several of the optimisation methods they suggest are irrelevant to those here in the UK.

Targeting Local Search Checklist

• Conduct key-phrase research to identifty relevant local search terms
• Think big but start small with your objectives
• Follow all of the bold high-lighted points above for optimum local SEO

Part Eleven

In part eleven I will cover the importance of high and low competition key-phrases in more detail by looking at the broader topic of competitor benchmarking and methods to use when analysing your competitor’s websites. Click here to go to part eleven.

Key-phrase Research

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

So far this guide has covered many of the planning stages that ought to be considered before a new website business is launched. The advice offered up to this point is most relevant to internet start-ups or small businesses looking to venture onto the web for the first time. One of the most crucial SEO planning stages is key-phrase research. Key-phrase research should be conducted before you brief a web design agency and, as mentioned in Part Six: Site Architecture, it should be integrated into the brief for the technical set-up of your website. This article follows on from Part Eight: WordPress and SEO. To go back to the start of my guide click here.

Key phrase Strategy

Key-phrase research and selection is particularly important for small business enterprises that have SEO on their agenda. Many small businesses make the mistake of not conducting any research at all based on the assumption that they know which key-phrases people are likely to use to find their products or services when searching on Google or other search engines. This approach is very risky for two main reasons. Firstly, the reality is that people will often not use the search terms you expect them use. Secondly, and more importantly, by assuming that you can achieve a top ten result for your selected key-phrase (“Home Insurance”, for example) you are not factoring in the competition from other websites that are already optimised on this term. Brand new websites that plan to enter a competitive market are unlikely to achieve top ten results for “head” key-phrases (high volume, one or two word search terms) in any short period of time. This is because established sites have factors such as their age, link popularity and site content stacked in their favour. A good small business SEO strategy should therefore be based on realistic objectives, taking into account market competition and the intent of the key-phrases selected.

Identify High and Low Competition Key-phrases

The first step you need to take to clarify your key-phrase strategy is to identify high and low competition key-phrases that people actually use when searching online. One of the best tools to assist you with this is Wordtracker. Wordtracker offers insight into actual daily searches across all of the search engines. More importantly, it offers competition analysis metrics such as KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) and a snapshot of the number of websites that use specific search terms in their META titles and back-links (two important elements of SEO, which I will cover in more detail later in this guide). Wordtracker has also recently introduced a tool that enables you to import search data from Google, allowing you to compare actual monthly searches on Google for specific key-phrases against the number of other websites competing on these terms. This data will help you to identify high and low competition key-phrases that you can use as a basis for your SEO strategy. You need to bear in mind that high competition key-phrases will often require a very significant amount of development time and link-building work in order to achieve a good result. Low competition key-phrases, on the other hand, can often be targeted through effective on-site optimisation. This can be summarised as follows:

• High Competition Key-phrases = Significant Link Building
• Low Competition Key-phrases = Content development + onsite optimisation

Small Business SEO Strategies

A recommended small business SEO strategy is to start by targeting low competition key-phrases (whilst optimising your website structure for high competition phrases as a longer term objective). Low competition key-phrases are, generally speaking, also characterised by low search volumes. These phrases are known as the “long tail” search, as they are normally four or more words long in opposition to the “head” of the tail which are one or two words long. The chart below illustrates this concept.

An example head key-phrase is “web design” which would appear near the top of the red section. An example long-tail key-phrase would be “cheap web design company Bournemouth” which would appear somewhere in the orange section. Although long-tail key-phrases are searched less often than head phrases, they often show a greater level of intent to purchase or sign-up on the part of the person searching. Someone who searches for “televisions”, for example, shows much less intent to purchase than someone who searches for “cheap Sony 40’ flat screen television”. Targeting the long-tail search is therefore an ideal starting strategy for small businesses and internet start-ups for the following reasons:

• You can focus on building great content in the early stages of your website. By doing so you stand a better chance of ranking for low competition key-phrases whilst supporting your longer term plans to target competitive “head” phrases
• Less link-building work required for long-tail search terms. Although link-building is essential if you want to develop the overall trust and popularity of your site, you can still achieve results whilst you build your link profile.
• You can target local search terms where the competition is, again, less intense. You might discover through your research, for example, that there are very few web design companies based in Bournemouth but a reasonable amount of people looking for this service at a local level.

Key-phrase Research Checklist

• Start-up businesses should conduct key-phrase research before they contact a web design agency
• Never assume to know the key-phrases people will use to find you. Ensure that you use a key-phrase research tool to discover search volumes and competition
• Define your long-term “head” key-phrases and your shorter term “long-tail” key-phrases and build this into your web development brief
• Put in place a content development plan to target the long-tail

Part Ten

In part ten I will cover local search in more detail looking at how small businesses can maximise the potential of geo-targeting. Click here to go to part ten.