Top 7 SEO Tips for Small Businesses

Small businesses often need to cut back their budgets and be careful with what they spend money on. Since search engine optimization is one of the most important areas to gain traffic from online for small companies, it's important to do some of the basic task yourself. The more SEO your business can do in-house, the better. Here comes a list with seven suggestions of tips of tasks to do for small businesses.

1. Submit your site to Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local
   
   Instead of hiring a local search guru, it's possible to submit your own site to the leading local search directories; Google places, Yahoo local and Bing Local. It's not hard at all. Simply sign up for the services and choose 5 relevant categories related to your business. Try to upload a few photos and videos if possible. After you become listed, ask happy clients to do reviews. Positive reviews will increase visibility in local search.
   
   
2. Do a proper competitor keyword research
   
   If a keyword or phrase is not listed on prominent places on a website, it’s not likely to be found either. Examples of prominent places on your site can be titles, main headlines, web content, image text and internal links.
   But how do you find new and relevant keyword for your business? One of the most popular tools is Google Adwords keyword tool. After signing in with your Google account, you can put in the URL of competitors in box on top of the site called ‘website’. Choose ‘exact’ as your preferred match type in order to get more relevant search volume. If you get too many words in the output, try to remove keywords with the ‘exclude terms’ function. After running a handful of tests for competitors, there should be a good list of keywords to analyse. The most relevant keywords can be made into new sub pages on your own website.
   
   
3. Implement new sub pages with relevant keywords
   
   Based on the competitor keyword research, it's time to start implement new sub-pages with the most relevant keywords you found. Pretend ‘widget company’ is one of the chosen keywords. What you do is creating a new sub page called ‘widget-company’ and include the term ‘widget company’ together with other relevant keywords in the title, headline, web content and alt text. Make sure to write is naturally in a way that makes sense.
   
   
4. Read web analytics data 10 minutes every day
   
   Sign up for a free web analytics tool such as Google analytics, Statcounter or Woopra and start collecting data. After a few weeks, you will have enough data to start comparing and measuring what's happening on your site. Pay attention to keywords giving high bounce rate. It might in the worst case indicate you don’t give the visitors what they like, but it can of course also be a very relevant description. Look out for keyword where people stay a long time on your site and try to find more keywords related to that topic, which can later be added to your site.
   
   
5. Write 1 new small article or news post per day
   
   Search engines consider how fresh your website is. If it’s not updated in months or years, while no new inbound links point your way, it can be an indication that your information might be outdated. Therefore, try to keep your content updated and relevant for readers. Writing news or blog posts every day is a good way to stay updated, especially if you post small snippets on sub pages so they gets updated automatically.
   
   
6. Ask for links from business partners and suppliers
   
   Backlinks is one of the most important factors to get your site ranking in Google, Bing and Yahoo. The first people to ask for backlinks from can be business partners and suppliers, which often tend to have relevant sites where your business can be mentioned with a link.
   
   
7. Submit your site to links directories and write articles for article directories
   
   Part of your backlinks can come from relevant link directories like Yahoo directory, DMOZ and Best of the web. It’s fairly simple to submit. All you need to do is to go to the website, put in the correct URL, contact details and description of your business. Article directories like EzineArticles, Knol, ArticlesBase and Top 7 Business can be worth to create a unique article for. The positive is that article submissions can create relevant visitors to your site and give a relevant backlink of your choice at the same time. Remember to create totally unique articles and read the rules of each article directory before submitting.

Markus Jalmerot is a SEO specialist with long experience of building his own websites. His SEO company offers flexible SEO consulting and performance based search engine optimization for interested parties.