5 SEO Tips for a Small Company (Part 1)

If I am a small company with an existing website, what can I do for my site to help my search engine rankings? What are your top 5 tips on SEO?

1. Good Content
Google says “Build a useful, information-rich website”
Why? A website with lots of good (non-salesy) information on your product or industry will likely be of interest to a huge range of people.

If you can develop a large amount of such text, it will naturally contain lots of keywords or phrases that people will search for in order to find you.

By having this, you will get lots of good traffic on a wide range of niche phrases where there is typically less online competition. The great thing about appearing highly for niche phrases is that there is usually a much better chance of the searcher becoming a sales lead or new customer.

Note that any content you decide to use MUST not appear anywhere else on the Internet or else your site will be viewed as having copied another site. (Searching for a “snippet of text within quotes” on Google will show you any mentions of that text online)

2. Titles
The single most important element that you have control over.
The <Title> tag is unseen by most people but 99% of websites have one.

Visit any webpage and if you’re using the Internet Explorer Browser, the text at the very top of your screen is the page’s title tag. (This is above the File, Edit, View etc menu)

For example, the Irish Government website has a Title tag of:
“Government of Ireland”

We always recommend that your title should be of the format:
“Company Name – Basic Phrase, Phrase Variation, Phrase Variation”

The Title needs to contain the primary phrases you would like to be ranked highly for.
Don’t include any words that people won’t search for including: ltd, limited, and, great, offers, our, etc

A good example is Ryanair:
“Ryanair.com – Cheap flights – Fly Cheaper, Car hire, Hotels, Travel Insurance”

This means they’re targeting the phrases: cheap flights, fly cheaper, car hire, hotels and travel insurance.

Make sure each of your pages have a different title tag containing 2-3 phrases relevant to the content of the page.

3. Headings
Open up today’s Irish Times and what do you see first?
A headline, underneath which is typically a smaller headline and then the story.

Use the same principles on your website for better rankings.

Every page should have a short heading describing the pages’ content which includes at least one target phrase that someone might feasibly search for.

The first webpage heading is typically placed inside <H1> html tags.
<H2> will then describe the sub-heading. (Your developer will understand this).

4. Site Map
If you have more than 20-30 webpages, use a sitemap.
This is simply one webpage with links to all the other pages on your site.

A sitemap is normally linked to from the bottom of very page.
It’s really just a simple way of telling Google where all your pages are.

5. Links
All search engine optimisation efforts are wasted without link-building.
A link from another site is viewed as a “vote of confidence” from that site in your site.

If you ask someone to link to you and they ask you for a link back, this is less beneficial although still useful. The hard question to answer is how to get people to link to you for free. In over 6 years of day-day web marketing, I’ve yet to meet a web marketing company who produces excellent link building results 100% of the time.

Get on the phone, talk to your clients and suppliers and ask them to link to you.

They probably won’t understand what you’re talking about at first so send them the following code and get them to tell their web person to add this code to their site.

<a href=”http://www.your-site.com”>Phrase you want to be top of Google for</a>

In our case, this might be :
<a href=”http://www.ringjohn.com”>RingJohn Web Marketing Ireland</a> which is where I’m targeting the phrase of “Web Marketing Ireland”

This would appear on the webpage like this: RingJohn Web Marketing Ireland

Check how many links you have by clicking “Inlinks” having input your domain & then clicked “Explore URL” at Yahoo Site Explorer.

Check your competition and then you’ll know how much work you have to do to overtake them in the rankings

Continue reading: 5 SEO Tips for a Small Company (Part 2)