This is the 2nd part of our sneaky little insight into the world of small business seo.
Following on from our first post on small business seo basics the 2nd part will cover a bit about social media, link building and any little extras we might think are relevant. The first part covered the importance of keywords and meta data. Right then, let’s press on…
Link building basics.
If you want to rank your website on the top of page 1 in all the major search engines you’re going to have to have links pointing to your website. Links are like votes of confidence to the search engines. Personally I think it is a load of crap and is only in existence because search engines can make money out of the fact it’s become increasingly difficult to rank your website. But hey ho, it is what it is.
What Google has to say about links:
Good links and bad links.
The best place to start seo link building for small businesses is with some local business directories. Look for everything in your area and put a company profile together on them. Try and make sure each time you create a company profile that your seo copy is unique, search engines love unique content so it will have a better chance of being put into their index and with it your link.
Don’t go buying 1500 blog post comments from some shading link building service that promises page 1 rankings guaranteed, it will get you absolutely nowhere and will inevitably end up with your website being penalised. Modern search engines are changing all the time and what gave you a top spot last week may put you on page 15 next week so be careful and keep it clean.
Link exchanges can help but only if it is done correctly and you’re not just buying links again or putting a page of a 100 random links on your website in return. Build up relationships with everyone you know that has a website and ask for backlink on a relevant page.
Another worthwhile endevour is using a tool to look at the backlink profiles of your competitors. It can be a time consuming affair but is definitely something you should be doing. After all, if they are at the top then they must be doing something right.
Social media & link building.
Social media marketing is the act of growing your company or organisations footprint and influence in online social communities that will result in actual increases in business. The basic but most prominent examples of influence are Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.
Building a base of followers across the various social media platforms can result in your website, offers, content and so on being shared across the web or locally between relevant prospects. The more your content gets shared via social media, the more backlinks and social signals your website will get.
These all play an important part in helping to validate your website in the eyes of the search engines as being something it should deliver to their users.
- Spend some time social media networking (here’s a post that covers small business social media)
- Spend some time creating content that’s worth people linking back to
- Spend some time building up a following on social media platforms that are relevant to your business
The value of great content.
Creating well written, on-topic, valuable content, optimising it with the correct keywords and doing this regularly will help your website rankings. As i’ve said above, great content will encourage people to link to your website but not only that, great content that is regularly written will increase your overall footprint in the search engine and in turn increase the likelihood of your site being delivered to your prospects.
You might even want to consider creating some content for a specialist website in your industry, not only will you get a great link back but you’ll also be increasing your authority in your chosen industry. Industry authoritative websites get much higher traffic levels than small business websites and grabbing a small piece of the action could result in additional backlinks.
