Search Engine Optimisation for Small Business
A lot has been (and gets) said about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Most of it is noise, some of it is quite bad.
For a small business owner who is busy doing actual business, building a website is hassle enough, let alone the constant pressure to appear high up in the organic Google Search results, because it is “free”.
Forget about metatags (well, have them, but they are no silver bullet), don’t be fooled by keyword stuffing, simply use the W3C validator to ensure your code is clean, and for other tips, try out HubSpot’s free Marketing Grader, and that should be your on-site SEO done.
Your off-site SEO basically boils down to to getting other websites to link to your website. Google is very democratic, a vote (or link) from a website demonstrates that your website has something worth looking at. A vote from a well established website (which itself has lots of votes) is worth even more.
The trouble is getting the votes (links) - it is actually quite difficult to persuade someone to link to you boring, stale corporate website - it can be spoofed - for an extreme example, we have the George Bush “Google Bomb” now since removed:
But spoofing can get you blacklisted from Google. Inbound links have to be gathered over time, in an ‘organic’ looking fashion. One solution, and its not an easy option mind, is a decent blog that is updated as often (at least once a week) as possible, that has genuinely useful information.
