Search Engine Optimisation SEO

As humans we spend more time ranting than taking actions; and since Google is the king of the traffic (sorry Facebook!) it seems many small business owners spend their time ranting about lack of traffic and ranking instead of realizing WHY THEY ARE NOT RANKING.

Here are my 10 brutally honest reasons why many small business sites fail in their ranking dreams.

This blog was originally written for Australian Businesswomen's Network herbusiness blog on the 1st February, 2012 - by Bianca Board.

Are your social media profiles helping your business be found on search engines?

Yes that’s right – search engines now rank social media sites in their results. This means whatever words you are frequently using on social media pages will count towards your search rank.

Higher social media ranking equals more traffic to your website! It highlights how important it is now to research and use your specific keywords on all your business profiles.

We've recently released a number of SEO products. We've got eBooks and SEO services. So which services are right for you? 

Have a read through the following profiles and pick the one which feels most like you: then read the services we recommend!

I've written a fair bit about simple SEO techniques that you can use to help boost your ranking in Google. But if you don't have any success on your own (or you don't have the time to dedicate to SEO because you're busy running your business!) you may want to engage the services of an expert. 

It's rarely wise to just throw money at someone without knowing what they're doing. So here's a handy guide to help you understand what is SEO, and if you're hiring someone to do SEO for your website, what exactly they may be doing for you and how to choose a company for SEO. Some of the things an SEO expert may do for you (or claim to) could be potentially harm your site just as much as they could help it, so it's important to go with a company for SEO that is honest and upfront about its methods.

If you've got a website it's pretty important to know how much it's benefiting your business. If you're spending money on SEO or AdWords you'll want to know how much that money you're spending is benefiting you. Most people can't afford to just throw money online without knowing what it's doing for them!

Website statistics allow you to work out:

• How many people are visiting your website
• Where those visitors came from
• What they were looking for (if they came from a search engine)
• How many pages they looked at before they left
• Whether or not they bought anything or filled out any online forms

When you make the move to get started with your business online, one of the first things you ought to consider is the domain name you want for your website. A domain is like a street address for the internet that tells the world where your website is located. Just like you might choose to open a store in one neighborhood over another, choosing the right domain name is an an essential part of branding strategy as you establish your business’s identity online. Deciding on the perfect domain can be somewhat tricky, so here are some tips and suggestions for finding and securing the best domain for your business as you're starting your website. 

Are you looking for ways to improve your web marketing online? Do you want to get loads more traffic to your website? Of course you do! More traffic in most cases equates to more business and who doesn’t want that?  

Marketing these days is about face-time and as we’re increasingly getting busier (some say the average female is hit with 4,000 messages on any given day) it’s getting harder and harder to get your message in front of the right people, and your brand remembered.
 

We’ve all heard that it’s a bad idea to judge a book by its cover, but with no fewer than a bazillion websites out there (give or take a few), sometimes the “cover” of a website is all you can go by! The average internet user reads only 20-28% of the text they see and spends roughly 7 seconds on a page before they click away to the next page or site.

Grabbing and keeping the attention of visitors to your site is something that requires a certain level of finesse, but with a few tweaks any site can be more clickable. Here are some rules of thumb for how to make your website worthy of clicks -- one of the first and most important steps for attracting customers.

Getting your site seen is one of the most challenging aspects of launching an online store for many business owners. Sometimes the best strategy to getting customers to your online store doesn’t have anything at all to do with what you put on your site – it’s what you put on other sites! So you need to know how to find links and get links.

When someone does a search on Google for something, in order to decide which pages should be displayed first, Google weighs several different factors. Keywords and links are two of the primary things considered. If someone trustworthy links to your website, Google sees this as a positive endorsement of your site and will bump you up rankings. 
 

Google is undoubtedly the most popular means of internet search these days. As King of the world wide web, if Google offers you an opportunity to do something for your business, you ought to consider it an offer you can’t afford to refuse. An important tool at your fingertips is listing with Google and it's free.

Google Places is a Google’s gift to local businesses to help them connect their online presence with their physical store. Essentially, Google Places is like a digital business directory that ties together your company name, physical address, and website. It’s a way of organising relevant information about your business, all in one place.