Ask Suzen: Do It Yourself SEO

Last week Jennifer Covello asked:

Hi Suzen,
As I'm sure you know, funds are usually not too plentiful for small business owners. We want the results from having a mind-blowing SEO campaign, but our wallets can't always afford it. What can small business owners do on their own to help get their sites and/or blogs found without breaking the bank?

Hi Jennifer,

Now a days there are MANY things you can be doing if you have a user friendly website, and off your site, to encourage searches and get Google — and people — to come to the site.

Lets talk first about the meaning of a “user friendly” site. By that I mean a website designed in a CMS (Content Management System), which is designed to make it simple for folks unfamiliar in writing code to update simple components of their website like content changes and updates. These platforms are getting more and more popular, and more sophisticated, and where as before were intended for blogs only, now are being designed and developed to be used as full blown websites and blogs.

CMS platforms such as Wordpress are Google’s best friend, meaning they work alongside one another to stay abreast of the current Google algorithms and make it simple for you to get into the back end and optimize for the search engines. They are constantly coming out with a steady drip of SEO friendly plug-ins — like the popular Wordpress plug-in ‘All In One SEO One Pack,’ and many more.

Simple things you can get started with? Making sure that your content is being updated often and that the content there is quality content — believe it or not Google now ranks on quality — but is also sprinkled with keywords — words that your target audience is looking for when you want them to find your website or blog. Think like someone who might be searching for the things you write about, or sell. Be in THEIR minds, and use those words in your titles and throughout your site.

Extra weight is given to the anchor text — text you use as a hyper link to something else, especially within your own site. If you can make the anchor text good keywords you will be indexed higher. Back links are another important component. There are many plug ins that allow for easy sharing of your content, but attention must be made as well to have link backs to your website from off site sources — directories, other authority sites and the search engines.

These few simple strategies should get you started on the road towards a visible site. Remember:

Keywords, links, especially backlinks, quality content and frequent updates, and you’re on your way. For more technical and structural components like meta tagging, clean URLs, alt tags, descriptors and titles you might have to bring in an SEO specialist. Hope this helps!  

So Get Founfd, Get Heard, Get Crackin'!