Five Ways to Promote Your Business Online — Part Iii: SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

SEO is a means of making your site highly relevant to search engines and search engine users through the use of things such as keywords, keyword phrases and back links. The more relevant your page is to a searcher’s search terms, the higher its page rank can become and the more likely you will attract visitors to your site. You know from experience that most search engine users typically do not go through pages and pages of search engine results. Usually they go to the links on the first one or two pages; so a high page rank for your website is essential. If you can get your site to appear on the first page of search engine’s search results, it is good for your website and obviously good for your business.

The Dark Side of SEO and Why You Should Avoid It

If you’ve ever surfed the web for anything, then you have also experienced good and bad SEO practices. Think about the things you have surfed for on the web. Do you remember how frustrating it was to click on a link that had nothing to do with your search? Sometimes it’s just the result of using search terms that are just too broad. Sometimes it is the result of questionable SEO practices.

Because ranking high in the search results of a search engine is so crucial to a website’s success and popularity, the temptation to “fool” the search engines is strong. One tactic is to load a website with popular keywords even if they are not relevant to the website’s content. Another is to create dummy pages with loads of backlinks. Backlinks are links from other web pages back to your site. Search engines view backlinks as an inidicator of a website’s popularity. It’s assumed that the more backlinks a website has, the more popular it must be. Loading a page with irrelevant keywords or creating bogus backlinks may work for a time, but in the end everybody loses. Search engine users don’t like such practices because it is frustrating to search for something only to end up at an irrelevant site. Search engines themselves frown upon the practice because it harms the usefulness of their search engine results. Ultimately, the websites that purposely use irrelevant keywords or false backlinks lose out because it gives their sites a bad name, it lowers their search engine ranking, and it can result in the website being banned from the search engines. All of those scenarios are bad for business. And this is to say nothing of the countless hours search engines like Google have spent creating complex algorithms to weed out the sites that try to trick them.

Ethical SEO Practices

But enough of the dark side of SEO. Now think of that same search and the links that were relevant to your search topic. Chances are you stayed at the site. You may have even bookmarked it for future reference. Maybe you even included a backlink to that site on your own site. You may even have told your friends and associates about the site. That’s good SEO. A well-written site with website copy centered around relevant keywords and keyword phrases can help improve your business! It will take a little more time and may require a little more effort, but in the end it is well worth it.

What Do Keywords Have to Do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Every successful business has a market and every market has a set of words or phrases that identify it. Choosing the right keywords to identify your site is just one part of search engine optimization.

Think about your own business. Try to describe it in a sentence. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. If they were looking for your business on the Internet, what words or phrases would they search for? Answering these questions will help you come up with keywords and keyword phrases that you may want to include in your site’s keyword tag as well as your site’s content, even it’s title and filename. (Putting good keywords in your website’s keyword meta tag just isn’t enough.)

Good keywords are an important component of SEO and they can help bring people to your website

For instance, let’s say someone is looking for a dry cleaner. That person might enter “dry cleaners” into a search engine. If you run a dry cleaning business and your website has “dry cleaners” in its copy, as part of its web address, etc., your website is more likely to show up on that user’s search results.

How to Discover the Best Keywords

Now you can sit and brainstorm for keyword ideas and hope you come up with a winner, or you can take advantage of some “instant keyword research.” A prime example is Google’s adwords program. Google adwords offers a “keyword ideas” link free of charge that can help you find just the right keywords for your business website. Simply put in a keyword idea and then let the software do the brainstorming for you. In the list that results you’ll find

• the most popular terms,
• the months those terms received the highest traffic,
• which terms are more likely to result in first page results, and more.

One thing you’ll note is that the more focused your keyword or keyword phrase the better your chances are of being found. In our dry cleaners example you’ll note that the phrase “dry cleaners” is extremely popular. That means the competition for that term is very high as well. Simply using that term for your website will likely NOT result in your dry cleaning site hitting the top of the search engine charts. However, a slight modification in the phrase to something like “one hour dry cleaners,” or “dry cleaning services” can improve your chances of a first page hit dramatically. The search volume numbers may not be as high, but by narrowing your focus you are also attracting more targeted customers and by using a keyword or keyword phrase with slightly less competition you are also increasing the likelihood of a first page ranking for those terms. Also, because you are honing your site to use more focused keywords and attract more focused customers, you are more likely to see higher click conversions.

All that said, it is important that you don’t go too far to the other extreme and become too specific in your choice of keywords. Pay attention to the data that you get from sites like Google Adwords. You’ll note there are some keyword phrases that have no data to report. This is usually because they are so specific most people are not searching for them.

The key is peppering your site with keywords and keyword phrases relevant to your market — and doing it ethically. As mentioned above, search engines will ban sites that abuse keywords. Having a website written around keywords and keyword phrases relevant to your business can improve its page rank and can help improve your business!

About the Author

Marco DeWebb is a freelance writer.

Need a website for your small business? It doesn’t have to be expensive. Visit www.DellwoodWebDesign.com for a FREE consult.