If you’re hoping to improve your small business’s search engine optimization (SEO), you’re not alone. According to an eMarketer survey, 68 percent of respondents are focusing more attention on their organic SEO efforts this year. Why all the fuss? Simply put, SEO is the best way to drive traffic to your website and help your business gain credibility, authority and exposure.
Start by reading a beginner’s guide to SEO like the one from Moz.com or the Google SEO Guide. SEO is pretty straightforward and is based on the following criteria:
- High-quality, original content posted frequently. Easy enough? Not for all businesses. But if you can make it a point to constantly give your customer new information about your business or industry, your results will improve. Consider outsourcing if you need help creating quality information.
- Make sure your content contains keywords that are relevant to your content and to what people are searching for. Check out Google’s Keyword Planner and Bing Keyword Research; both allow you to search for popular keywords in your industry.
- Your content should include both internal links (links to other pages within your own site) and external links (links to good-quality websites).
- Your social networking presence makes a difference in your SEO results, so keep sharing and encourage your customers to retweet, repost and re-pin your content.
- Metatags are the descriptions of your content that show up in search results. There are many plugins that can help you create the best metatags; Hubspot and WordPress SEO by Yoast can help.
- Of course the brilliant minds at BizTraffic.com can help as well.