All Things Search

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the Internet has helped level the playing field for small businesses around the globe. Unfortunately many small businesses do not have a general marketing budget and therefore cannot afford to spend a lot of money working on their search engine rankings.  Here is a few top tips that can be implemented by small businesses to assist their rankings:

1. CONTENT IS KING

Search engines love content, the more content that you can add to your website the better, an analogy that I like to use is: “fish and a fishing pole - when explaining how text heavy sites often outrank thin ecommerce sites, I like to call searchers fish and each word on the page an additional fishing pole in the water. The more text you have on a website the more searchers you are likely to ‘catch’”.

It is important that the content added to your site is unique, a good idea to increase content is to add a frequently asked questions page which you can update regularly or even better add a blog which you post to on a weekly basis.

2. THE PERSONAL TOUCH

Customers often like the personal touch and opinion. Make your personal knowlege on your subject known, this will help you become an authority in the eyes of a searcher/potential customer. (again using a blog will help here).

3. LOCAL SEARCH IS IMPORTANT

Optimising for local search is crucial. There are many ways to do this, one such way is to incorporate geographical terms in your on-page optimisation (ie. Your city name in the META title and H1 tags). The other thing that is quick and easy to do is register with Google Places, Yahoo Local & Bing Local - this allows people to find your business through the map searches etc.

4. WEBSITE SPEED

As stated in a previous post, Google now incorporates a website’s loading speed in it’s algorithm. Use the tools highlighted in the previous post to check and improve your website’s loading speed.

5. PRESS RELEASE

Write a press release for local online media outlets (and offline). make sure that you have links (with anchor text) back to your website. This can be a crucial help - one of my recent press releases has led to a pitch for one of the countries largest organisations - It can work very well.

 Hope you like these tips…. feel free to add more if you like.

This month Matt Cutts has proclaimed on his blog that Google have decided to incorporate site speed (loading times) in their search algorithm. What this means from a practical sense is that if your website takes a long time to load, it may be penalised by Google’s new ranking system.

On the Google Webmaster’s blog it states:

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

If you are worried about your website’s speed you can use the following tools to check out how your site performs: 

For more information: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

I don’t think this change is a major problem for most websites, as many sites do not take very long to load. It may however be a problem with websites that have loads of pictures/ Flash (which I dislike with a passion!) or video content.