Optimize Your Own Website With These SEO Tips

The major challenge of search engine optimization (SEO) for small business owners is that the rules change often. While some small business owners may have a basic understanding of SEO techniques, most do not have the time to stay on top of current trends. The result is that most small business websites are either completely unoptimized for today's search engines or they have some optimiziation using old or outdated steps. Here, I will share some website optimization tips that are beneficial to most websites, have stood the test of time, and are relatively simple to implement.

To begin with, your site must be visible to search engines, which is not the same as being visible to humans. Search engines cannot understand and rank your web site if their "spiderbots" cannot follow links between pages. Therefore, every website should have a sitemap. Simply do a search for "create sitemap" to find sites where you can create and download your own sitemap.

Your website should also use HTML-based text links to connect all your pages together. Some search engines currently have difficulty reading links contained within programming languages such as Flash and Javascript. While a sitemap will help the engines see a basic outline of your website, using text links alone or in addition to other types of links will enable your site to be indexed and ranked appropriately.

Now that we are sure your site can be found, the next major step is to provide quality information, or content. Quality content must be relevant to your site, offer a unique perspective, and be timely in nature. Updating or adding content frequently tells search engines consistent effort is going into your site's content, and may provide a ranking boost to your site when other factors are similar. One of the reasons blogs are so popular now is due to their simple manner in which content may be added, updated, or changed. Any content added should reflect one of the basic themes or areas of focus on your site. Websites with no focused topics find top rankings impossible to achieve. After adding your new content, be sure to link your other pages to the new content - taking care to use descriptive words in your link text (often called "anchor text").

Sites that offer useful content updated regularly will eventually attract a lot of internet surfers. However, SEO for small business cannot be considered complete without strategies to speed up the process. The general term for this process is link development (or "link-building") and is a third major step in search engine optimization. Building link popularity can involve actions such as sending out optimized press releases whenever newsworthy events occur regarding your business. Other forms of link popularity include contacting other websites and directories with similar content or groups and request for a link to the site.

Many options exist for affordable website design. They design an effective web site which is easy to use, easy to navigate and attractively designed. When considering potential web design firms, consider more than just cost alone - ask about their knowledge of search engine optimization techniques. Without at least a basic understanding of SEO techniques, you could end up with a website that is overlooked or ignored by search engines.

An SEO web designer's strategy is to increase natural web traffic and improve your search engine rankings. True SEO web design isn't a miracle, it's an art that necessitates following a fairly distinct path of website expansion including valuable reader content, properly design pages, significantly placed key search terms, search term modification and page assessment. Search engine optimization is first about getting your site listed in the search engines, secondly about ranking well and, most importantly, about bringing the right visitors to your website.

R. Jason McGhinnis is an experienced business website designer, search engine optimizer, and owner of eNCarolina Web Services. Visit his blog to learn more about SEO for your business.