Quick SEO Guide For New Websites

SEO, SEO training, Small Business Marketing,

Quick SEO guideA volume of online content is available for owners of new websites. Most advice is targeted at business owners deciding how much to spend on their new online presence. Paying a professional web design firm enables these owners to deploy a fancy website without spending in-house resources.

However, once a new site is live, businesses must move on to the next phase of online competition. Improving the search engine rankings of a new website is just as important as creating the site itself. Thankfully, a basic search engine optimization (SEO) effort can be described in a single article.

The following is a quick SEO guide for new websites:

Check On-Site Issues

Look for broken links. Even brand-new websites can suffer from broken internal links. As pages are moved or additional content is added, site administrators can miss an occasional broken link.These errors, though small, can magnify over time and reduce site credibility and performance.

Make the site accessible to search engines. Search engines are computers that “read” your site in a different way than humans. Technical files like the robot.txt are critical to search engines even as they are invisible to end users.

Test site speed. Faster websites rank better in Google and Bing. Faster websites are more popular with users as well. Check for speed-related problems such as caching, image size, or excessive redirects to ensure you have a fast website. The webmaster of a sports site saw a 12% increase in search rankings across 115 keywords just by reducing image sizes on the photo-heavy website.

Delete bloated code. Websites consist of content directed at humans and code directed at computers. While this back-end code is required for all sites, try to achieve a 1:1 ratio of content readable to humans and code intended just for computers.

Create More Content

New content is the lifeblood of the internet. Search engines reward sites with useful, timely, and relevant content that is updated regularly. Unfortunately new sites have very little content and are trying to compete with established sites with years of content.

According to Hawaii SEO company, Argon Marketing, new website owners should incorporate a simple rule when it comes to developing content:

Match the quality of content on your competition’s site, then beat them on volume.

Different industries have different guidelines. The quality of content on the website for a physician’s group will be quite different than the content used for a take-out restaurant. But within a specific industry, it is easy to identify the level of quality required by simply looking at the websites that rank for relevant key words.

New site owners should determine the quality of content necessary to rank in their industry, then spend resources generating more content than their competition. When performed properly, this method of content generation ensures long-term success for a business and its website.

Develop a Strategy For Links

Google has a public set of guidelines for new webmasters. Bing’s guidelines are quite similar. In both cases, search engines try to reward sites that do certain things and punish sites that do other things. The distinction between these types of sites, though murky, is called “white-hat” and “black-hat” in the online community.

Moralistic and legal arguments aside, each new website owner should develop an overall strategy for the method by which they intend to get new links. At one extreme, an owner can do absolutely nothing and hope to generate free, organic links over time. At the other, an owner can actively advertise to pay prominent websites cash in exchange for links. The former will result in terrible rankings for years. The latter will result in search engine penalties within weeks.

All site owners need to determine where they want to fall between the two extremes. Before considering specific tactics or working on keywords, the website owner should settle on a long-term plan for the method of acquiring links. Their level of risk-tolerance, industry, and purpose for the site should affect the link strategy. Then, in turn, the link strategy will determine which particular link tactics the site should utilize.

These three, basic steps, are the first actions a new website owner should take when trying to begin an SEO strategy. Whether working on SEO in-house or paying for a professional, online marketing company, the owners of new websites need to invest resources to compete with their established competition.

This article has been written by Nolan Kido. Nolan works in the technology industry in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Best SEO Practices for Small Business

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is Important For Businesses of All Sizes

Photo by ellenm1 / Flickr

Small business owners have a lot on their plate, and SEO may be the furthest thing from their mind most of the time, but it’s actually very important for the success of most types of businesses. From restaurants to retail shops to other service based businesses, search engine optimization is a way to generate more revenue by attracting customers.

Best Small Business SEO Practices

Here’s a look at some of the ways small businesses can do better with SEO.

  • Know When to Outsource – Another important thing is to know when to outsource SEO. While some things may be able to be handled in-house, if you’re serious about your business, you’re going to want to bring in professionals to get the job done correctly. On the bright side, this frees you up to run the rest of your business.

  • SEO is Not Free – While organic search traffic is technically free – you don’t have to pay Google or other search engines to get it – you’re still paying for the traffic because of SEO work that’s needed. The good news is that the money you spend on SEO can result in a good return on investment if you know what you’re doing.

  • Know Who to Work With – Speaking of outsourcing SEO, it’s a good idea to spend some time learning about any company you’re thinking about working with. You want to make sure they don’t use Black Hat methods that may get your website in trouble. Google doesn’t really care if a third party trashed your website.

  • Avoid Over Optimization – When it comes to SEO in 2013 and beyond, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. When you over optimize your pages, you’re going to set off red flags for the search engines. And when this happens, it can really affect your rankings in the search engines.

  • SEO is Ongoing – Unlike some other technology or marketing related projects, SEO is a continuous process. Small businesses need to understand that SEO should be budgeted into their overall marketing strategy from the get go. As it pays off, even more money should be put into this type of marketing.

Following the SEO tips and advice above will get you headed in the right direction when it comes to search engine optimization. The most important thing to remember is that you don’t want to do anything to upset the search engines. When you do this, you’re going to have a lot of trouble ranking anywhere in their index. Instead of trying to trick Google and Bing, work with them and produce only high quality content that people – not machines – want to read.

Writer enjoys reading different infographics about various topics to stay current.

WordPress Blog Article Strategies

Blogging, content marketing, SEO, Wordpress

Photo Credit by Heisenberg Media / Flickr

If you’re looking for great WordPress blog article strategies, you’ve come to the right place. A lot of people have WP blogs these days, but not everyone knows how to come up with good content in order to attract and – more importantly – retain readers. Below are several ideas and strategies that you can use to increase your chances of blogging success.

WordPress Blog Article Strategies

Here are some ideas that will help you deal with content on your WordPress blog.

  • Know Your Audience – The first thing you need to do is make sure you know your audience. The more you know about them, the easier it will be to come up with article ideas that they’re going to like. And if you do manage to hit a homerun when picking topics to write about, you’re going to attract an audience – one that will keep coming back for more content.

  • Be Consistent – If you can only publish once a week do that, but make sure you’re consistent with it. Some bloggers only post occasionally with no rhyme or reason as to when they post. This works as long as your content is very high quality and can’t be found anywhere else on the Internet.

  • Be Useful – This should be common sense, but you might be amazed at how many people think they just need to write out a certain number of words that sound good together without actually being useful in their posts. The more useful your articles, the more readers you’re going to attract – all without spending money. The good news is that it’s not hard to be useful if you spend some time writing the content.

  • Be Entertaining – This is not a requirement, but if you can also be entertaining – especially funny – you can get a lot more action with each article you write for your WordPress blog. You want to make sure you don’t push it too far, though. There’s a fine line and you need to make sure you walk it carefully.

  • Be Interactive – In the past, when an article was published it was difficult for the writer and readers to interact with each other. The Internet has changed this. These days it’s important to acknowledge and interact with your readers. You don’t want to spend all your time on this, but it’s something you should do a little. It can really make your readers feel special and make them lifelong fans of your blog.

If you can follow some or all of the tips and advice above, there’s a good chance you’re going to be able to slowly but surely increase your audience quite a bit. And when you have more readers, you’re going to have a better chance of making money with the website.

This writer enjoys reading infographics online – at least the ones that are well designed.