It’s incredibly frustrating to put all the time and energy that you have into starting a local small business only to find out that no one can even find you on Google. Before you throw in the towel and start investing your hard earned money on pay per click (PPC), here’s a tip on affordable SEO for small business; Investigate if these are some reasons you’re not ranking and fix them.
1. Under Optimizing Your Website
There are some simple things Google looks for on your site. Find out what your main goal is for your business, find your keywords and implement them in good content. Google will see that you may be useful for someone looking up those key words and rank you higher for them. Avoid a lot of flash, images with content you want read, or dynamic pages because Google can’t physically see them. Make sure your main content is in text so that a search engine robot can actually use it.
2. Over Optimizing Your Website
Now that you’ve found your keywords there are a few things to avoid. One of the biggest concerns is keyword stuffing. Your keywords should be in good content and fit with the page. If you’re putting every keyword you can find into every title, description, and alt tag you have on your page you’re doing more harm than good. Keep it short and direct.
3. Not Enough Incoming Links
The more links that lead to you from other websites the higher your rank will be; your keywords should come from good, relevant content as well as pages that already have a high rank. Many websites were hurt by Google’s new Panda Update because of keyword spamming, spammy link building strategies, and links from unnatural or irrelevant content. Avoid these practices like the plague.
4. No Longevity
The longer your content has been around, the longer your links have stayed alive, and the less your main page changes dramatically the better. Basically, don’t go around changing your title, href’s or alt tags every other day or any other major structure of your website and you’ll be golden. You wouldn’t change the underlying structure and direction of your house everyday; don’t do it on your website either.
5. Not Enough Fresh Content
Yes you shouldn’t make any major changes to your existing content, but you should have new and relevant content for Google to index. Google re-indexes your site regularly so you should try to add at least 1-2 fresh pieces of relevant content a week. The more fresh your site, the better. Most websites do this by creating a blog on their domain which is probably the easiest way to add content that people can share which of course makes more links back to you. This is what makes WordPress and other blogging platforms so great for SEO.
Original Author: Masters of SEO
