Bizsuccess

Friday, December 16, 2011

By: Susan Gunelius

Many small businesses don’t have the budget to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) expert to ensure their websites are built and designed in the best way possible to drive the maximum amount of search engine traffic. If you do nothing else to optimize your small business website for search engines, do the five things listed below. These SEO tricks are the ones that every small business website should use regardless of its size, location, industry, or any other factor.

1. Delete Splash Pages.

Splash pages are those entry pages that some websites show to visitors before they visit the actual site. Splash pages a’re usually pretty, but lack depth of content which reduces the amount of text search engines can crawl. Furthermore, splash pages can cause what search engine optimization experts refer to as splint link popularity where instead of having just one page for other websites to link to, they now have two pages. By splitting incoming links between two pages, each individual page appears to be less popular and less authoritative than a single page with all of those links leading to it would be in terms of how Google ranks pages in its search algorithm.

2. Reduce or Eliminate Flash Elements.

Search engine optimization experts typically agree that optimizing web pages that are made up primarily of flash elements is challenging. The process of optimizing flash pages for search engines is vastly different from optimizing traditional text and image pages. Flash might look pretty, but it’s not good for attracting search traffic.

3. Buy Your Own Domain.

Don’t host your small business website on a platform that requires you to use a domain which you don’t own. If your business is successful (even slightly successful), the day will come when you need to make your website better, and that typically requires getting your own domain. When that happens and you have to change your small business website URL, all of the previous links, bookmarks, etc. to your site will be lost. You’ll need to start over again with building links and increasing your search results rankings. That’s a position you don’t want to find yourself in, so get your own domain and start using it as soon as possible.

4. Use Title Tags Strategically.

Look in the title bar at the top of your web browser when you visit your website. What does it say? This text comes from the title tag in your website’s HTML code, and search engines use it in search algorithms. Therefore, your title tag should be descriptive and include keywords. However, don’t stuff keywords into your title tag or duplicate content in your title tag. That’s a guaranteed way to get your site banned from Google results entirely because it’s viewed as a form of spam as discussed below.

5. Remove Anything Google Doesn’t Like.

Review your entire website and make sure you’re not committing any SEO don’ts. For example, stuffing keywords, hiding keywords, publishing duplicate content (from your site or from other sites), and publishing paid links are all viewed as spam tactics by Google. If you’re guilty of doing any of those things, fix them right now. Follow the link to learn more about SEO don’ts, so you know what to avoid on your small business website.