christian news: SEO Basics for Small Business

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Small Business SEO advice, resources and free tools.

Do you have a website for your small business? Is it bringing you in sales leads? Can you find it in the search engine results for your brand name, key products of services?

The internet is now the key channel for people researching and purchasing products and services. If your website is not being found then it is like a car without petrol. It?s a nice thing to own but of little practical use.

Sites don?t appear at the top of the search result by accident. There are processes that all business no matter what size can follow in order to improve their rankings (position within the search results).

If you run a small business and have a website then you really need to have a basic understanding of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) process and techniques.

I have attempted to collate some useful resources and links for small business owners to give you a basic beginner?s level understand of the processes of SEO.? I have broken these down into a few key sections.

These are:

General SEO tips and advice
SEO Keyword Research for Small Business Advice and tips
Meta Data for SEO advice and guidelines
On Page SEO Advice
Free Small Business Link Building Advice
Free SEO Tools

General Resources SEO tips and advice

The following links provide some great basic SEO tips and outlines. They look at basic SEO strategy and outlines the processes and order in which you should approach the search engine optimization for your website.

SEO Basics for Small Business

http://www.smallbusiness.co.uk/blogs/guest-blogger/1514528/social-media-seo-tips.thtml

http://welovebusiness.co.uk/a-guide-to-seo-for-small-businesses/

http://www.bizface.co.uk/bizfaceforum/blogs/roymoggadmin/top-6-search-engine-optimization-tips-bizface-tv-channel-131/

SEO Keyword Research for Small Business Advice and tips

Once you have an understanding of the basics of SEO the first part of the process is keyword research. You need to make sure that you are focussing your SEO effort on optimising your website for the correct keyword phrases and search terms. These links explain the keyword research process and the importance of long tail keywords in SEO.

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2010/06/keyword-research-tips/

Meta Data for SEO advice and guidelines

After you have completed the SEO keyword research for your website and made the selection for your keywords then the next stage is creating bespoke SEO meta data for the pages on your website. The following links explain the importance of the title, description and keyword tags in SEO and how to write good SEO focussed meta data.

Dublin Core Meta Data Guides

http://libguides.mit.edu/content.php?pid=158753&sid=1795676

Meta Data for Dummies

http://blog.hudsonhorizons.com/Article/What-is-Metadata-SEO-for-Dummies.htm

On Page SEO Advice Tutorials

Once the keyword research has been completed and meta data has been created for your website the next stage of the SEO process is to look at on page factors that can influence your rankings with the search engines. ?On page factors are those that you can control on your website such as the text, structure and coding of the webpages.

On page SEO Checklists

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-beginners-checklist-for-small-business-seo

http://www.seosmarty.com/on-page-seo-checklist/

Free Small Business Link Building Advice

Once you have your on page SEO complete with new Meta data, text and internal linking then it is time to move onto the most important and most difficult part of the SEO process. Link building in tandem with your on page SEO work will have the greatest positive influence on your search engine rankings. These articles explain the importance of links, the different metrics of links, including anchor text and how to look for and build links to your website.

http://smallbusinessshift.com/guides/link-building/

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/link-building-techniques-tips.html

Google Analytics

Once you have completed the SEO tasks and started on your link building it is important to have some metrics to measure the success of your SEO campaign. ?Google Analytics is a free tool and the industry standard for the analysis of website traffic.

These links will explain the basics of analytics and how to use them to measure the success of your SEO campaign.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

http://www.3232design.com/blog.cfm?id=24

http://www.knowthenet.org.uk/knowledge-centre/business/web-analytics

Free SEO Tools

I have also rounded up some free online tools that will help you with your SEO campaigns.

Keyword Research

Google Keyword Tool ? this will help you discover the keywords you need to focus on for your SEO campaign.

https://adwords.google.co.uk/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS#search.none

Meta Data and on Page Checks

What Google Sees ? This tool shows you if your meta data is being read correctly by the google bot.

http://www.seoconsult.com/seo-tools/what-google-sees.html

Keyword Density Checker ? This neat tool will show you the percentage of your keywords on any page of your website. Make sure you don?t stuff too many keywords into the text.

http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/

Back Link Analysis

I have included what I feel are the three best free tools for analysis of your back link profiles that are currently available.

Yahoo site explorer ? This is a great tool for discovering the number of backlinks to a website.

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Push 2 Check ? Push to check is a great tool for the analysis of a number of metrics, these include Google page rank and yahoo backlinks. One issue is that it only works with the homepage of a website.

http://push2check.com/

Open Site Explorer ? Open site explorer is a great free tool. It does limit the number of searches you can do until you open a free account. Its pulls in lots of data for you including anchor text and domains. It doesn?t update as regularly as the yahoo link database.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

I hope you find these articles and tools useful and that they offer clear and easily understandable explanations for the basics of SEO for a small business website.

Tony Heywood (C)