SEO Basics for Small Businesses
Achieving organic search engine visibility is a major goal for all small businesses. Building links to your website and gaining rankings in the search results are critical to success. This blog post covers some of the basics involved with SEO, and provides some helpful tips on how to get started.
Which search engines should you focus on?
Building links to your website
Making keyword research easier
Diving into the basics of optimization
Tips for compiling a technical SEO checklist
The importance of meta tags and XML sitemaps
4. The last and final is the backlink. Backlinks are the links to threads of your website which are coming from other websites. These are generally from other websites that are related to yours in content or theme.
There are many ways to create backlinks for your site and gain rankings:
Strategy #2 – Build Links To Your Website
The first step is to identify the right sites where you can build links to your website. This will raise your organic search engine rankings faster, and will be better capable of converting a visitor into a sale.
"The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital and complex process for any business to take advantage of. This means that any serious business that wants to survive in today's competitive world should have a plan in place for optimizing it's search engine position."
In post #6 of his blog at www.linkedin.com, Christine McCausland talks about the subject of link building strategies, pertaining to how they can be utilized to not only improve your website rankings, but also drive additional traffic.
... – this is done by strategically choosing 'why' you want your website ranked higher in the search engines, and 'what' it needs to do to achieve that goal. For example, if you are a online retailer and your product is a fashion watch, then you would need to determine what keywords people are using to search for fashion watches. This can be done through keyword research.
... – determine the types of anchor text (keywords) that are related to your website i.e. how can other sites get links to your website by using your keywords as anchor text in their link? Include common keyword phrases such as "click here", "as seen on" and "related links". Google looks at these percentages to gauge the relevance of backlinks with regard to the page they will appear on.
... – it is important to find out what the competition is doing on their own website, by reviewing their site's webmaster tools.
Strategy #3 – Build Backlinks To Your Website
One of the most valuable things you can do to help your website rank higher in the search engines is to build backlinks. This helps websites that rank higher in search engines pass links to you, which increases your visibility.
Here are a couple of useful resources on backlinks:
...
...
↑ ...
Can you increase your PageRank? Yes! To see how many PageRank points I have for my blog click here .
Think of a link as direct promotion for your website. The more backlinks you have on other websites that point to your website, the more people will learn about your products and services.
Strategy #1 – Link Building Is A Powerful Ranking Factor
Search engines use links to evaluate a website's relevance in a particular search query. The more authoritative sites that link to you, the higher you will rank for keywords related to your business. Take advantage of this by strategically building links to promote your business.
... – If you need assistance with the link building process, there are several tools available to help you:
Useful resources on link building:
... – this tool helps to find sites linking back to your website or websites on a specific topic (e.g. marketing, photography, etc.), and then shows you the list of backlinks they have on their own websites. This will help you find relevant anchor text to use in your links. You may also want to add your own website to the tool to make it more useful.
If you want a more advanced version of this tool, check out SEMRush (http://www.searchengineoptimizer.com/). It is a lot like Google Analytics for Search Engines, and it tracks backlinks for multiple domains with a detailed report in either XML or HTML format.
SEMRush (http://www.searchengineoptimizer.com/). It is a lot like Google Analytics for Search Engines, and it tracks backlinks for multiple domains with a detailed report in either XML or HTML format.
SEOBook (http://www.seobook.com/) is another link building tool that I have used to great success during the launch of my blog and in building backlinks to my website. SEOBook points out the sites that are linking to your site on a particular topic (i.e., marketing), and gives you the contact information of those sites. You can then contact them and ask them if they would be willing to add your website as a reference or profile on their website, giving you backlink in return.
DMOZ ( http://www.dmoz.org/ ) is a directory of websites and information about specific topics. The DMOZ site allows you to enter in the keyword you are promoting and it will show you all the other sites that have information related to that topic, with a link back to your own website. keywords: seo, link building
so, where in my case, like say I am just the author of this blog post with no affiliation whatsoever with any company or anything of the sort. So using that as an example I would go ahead and click on 'show me all the sites' at the bottom right of the screen next time I login...
... and here you can see the screens where I got my list of sites to contact.
So as you can see that's an easy way to get a whole bunch of links that are on topic, which is good for my websites rankings. Hope this helps :)
Strategy #2 – Contact Sites For Additional Backlinks
After you have put together a list of all the sites with links back to your website, you need to contact them and ask them if they will add additional links from their website to yours. If a reputable site already has a link from your site, it is more likely that they will be willing to include another link for free. Here are some guidelines on how to contact site owners:
... – Start with a brief email that states who you are, and why you want to share links with them. If they have not linked to your website in the past, explain why you want their site to be seen as an expert on your topic. Be sure to include the list of links you want them to add.
... – Do not be pushy, and do not send generic emails (e.g., "Can I get backlinks from your website?"). You need to be careful about this because it can backfire if the other website owner is not happy about getting a 'cold call'.
Conclusion
Google has the ability to rank websites that are similar to your website, so make sure you are promoting your website in the right places. If you do not already have a website that ranks well, you should consider starting one. If you already have a website, use it to promote other websites, and build backlinks from your own site.
I hope you found this post helpful - if so please share it on social media etc...! xICOx
Follow me for more posts about blogging (or anything else :D) on my blog: http://www.SEOproJMiller.com/blog/
...