We are now on week 3 of our SEO tips for small businesses. We have had 10 search engine optimization tips for small businesses for the past two weeks. This week, we have 10 more tips on how to improve your SEO on your website.
- Create content for real people, not search engines. Content that ranks well won’t rank well for long if real people don’t find interest in your pages. No one likes to feel like they are being tricked into something. Don’t keyword-stuff and be natural in you methods to persuade visitors to buy or engage with you. Don’t be a grease salesman, be a genuine authority on your subject that people will go out of their way to find and share.
- Remove duplicate content, duplicate content, duplicate content. It is annoying to real people and search engines. Most importantly you can be penalized by search engines for having the same, or very similar, content on multiple pages of your site.
- Remove, merge, or add to pages with little content on them. Having lots of small content-light pages, can result in visitors spending short time looking at you pages which reduces page-view time or bounce rate and search engines may start downgrading all of your site’s keyword rankings if they perceive the fast click through rates to mean people are not staying long because they are not finding what they are looking for.
- Plagiarism will still get you flunked. Don’t copy content from other websites. Duplicate information is bad when search engines find it on your own pages. If search engines find that content on your site has been taken from elsewhere, that is even worse. Some engines when they discover direct plagiarism may downgrade your rankings. It is not worth the risk and it could effect some, or even all, of your webpages.
- Claim all of your pages. Linking your Google+ account is the first step, but did you now there are other places where your site or business may have automatically created landing pages? Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, and may others will create landing pages to content they deem useful, which may include you — without ever alerting you! Claiming and maintaining your content everywhere it may appear improves both rankings and click-through rate.
- Make sure your page is good enough to be in the top results of search listings. If your site is just a facade, there is no way it will get featured on “The Lifestyles of the Click Rich and Search Famous.” Occasionally. a website will get a lucky strike and land smack-dab on the front page for a nice 15 minutes of fame. This is the opportunity to make and keep long-term valuable linkbacks,but if you haven’t created a structure that can withstand popularity than it will be all for naught.
- Engaging your visitors. The more engaging, the longer people stay. The longer they stay, the higher the chance of a conversion/goal, and that is a signal to search engines that your site deserves more visitors and they will grant you with higher rankings.
- Consider offering videos. Videos increase the amount of time people spend on your site. Videos also allow you an opportunity to get links from video sites like Youtube.
- Charts, graphs and infographics are great content. People like to share and link to great easy to understand visual content more than plain written content.
- More content sometimes means better ranking. Search engines reward, and visitors trust sites that are filled with lots of content. The key here is to make sure your content is well categorized and of good quality.
Each week, we will have another set of SEO tips to help your small business. Check out Design Web’s Facebook page here to stay up-to-date on the latest news and information.
