Some DIY SEO Tips for Small Business | Search Engine Optimization Tricks!

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is vital for Online Marketing, though due to some recent changes with Google algorithms; small business owners are facing a real tough time. We all are aware with the fact that small business owners don’t have the budget to afford the high end SEO campaigns, but believe me, they themselves can perform some small tasks to gain some love from search engine giants like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Read on this blog to know more about some Do It Yourself SEO for small business and take benefits of these SEO tricks or search engine optimization tips.

Let me clear you all that this blog post is nothing like a full technical stuff to let you know how to do SEO of your website, rather in this post I am going to share a few tricks and tips which will help you to make your website rank higher in search engines. All these tips and tricks are the outcome of my around ten years of career as an SEO, and I am quite hopeful that it will benefit you all.

Understanding Your Clients

One of the best way to becoming a master in SEO of your own website is to understand the needs and behavior of your clients. One of the best ways to do so is to search for the services or products which you want to sell and take notes from the successful sites.

Understand the business strategies of your competitors who are already ranking high on search engines, understand their benchmarks, customer reviews and feedbacks of their clients, also do a study of sentiments in favor or against of them on social media sites.

All these will be able to help you to analyze your own strengths and weaknesses and will help you to stand in a better way.

Do a Bit of Keyword Research

Forget about the days when people were thinking about ranking their website for a few sets of keywords, these days search engines especially Google gives personalized results to each user depending on their preferences, locations, previous searches, etc. and so each and every user will be able to see an entirely different set of results for a particular keyword search.

But still, fix some keywords for your online business; try to focus on some long tail keywords or key phrases, which should always relate to your business.

As you are the master of your own business, so you must be aware with what key words or phrases people will search for your products or services, thus do the keyword research as per the need of your own customers only.

I would recommend using Google Keywords tool for keyword research, earlier it was free and open for all, but now a days it requires an Adwords account to use it. It is still free though. On the other hand if your budget allows you might use Word Tracker or SEMRush for this purpose, both of them are paid tools though.

Website Planning

Once you have your target keywords list ready with you, now you can plan your website accordingly. Prepare a list of pages depending on the list of keywords or phrases and I would suggest you all to have one separate page for each major keyword or phrases for your site.

Prepare a list either on paper or on a spreadsheet and put all the pages along with their respective keywords on it, and then break them into top level, mid-level and low-level pages.

Prepare your navigation system accordingly.

Build Your Website

Now you can be able to build your website. Focus on building a website which should be simple in design, easy to read and that user’s love and want to share with their near and dear ones.

Since now you are in 2014, so you should focus on building a website which will be responsive in design and change its look as per the device on which user is opening it. Read more about the responsive design and other effective SEO tips for 2014 by visiting this blog of mine.

While building your website you should focus on these two things:

1. Avoid using flashing objects, different and colored fonts, and so many banners, so that the user should not be confused with where to look for information they want.

2. Try to utilize the space above the fold and put your best things in that area only, as Google recently updated their Page Layout algorithm. I will be planning another blog on it very soon. Follow me on my twitter account to know more about it: https://twitter.com/vatsalok

Simplify Your Sales Page

One of the secret behind every successful online business is a very well written, and concise sales page, every online business should follow these tricks. Very few customers will prefer to read 2000 words articles on your products or services; you might put them in a separate page and link them from the sales page.

Your prime motive is to put the best possible maximum 300-500 words content on your sales page, which should be concisely written.

Focus on Page Content

Original and informative content is the need of the time. This is something which I am saying from so many years. Always remember that each page of your website should always give some unique things to the users.

Many website owners do this mistake of providing duplicate content on their pages. In most of the cases they use to take it from their own website only, but this approach is really harmful. You should ignore this tendency. Prepare separate content for each page of your website.

Focus on Title and Meta Description

Meta tags like Title and Description are too important, even in this age of post Penguin and Panda world. SEO has changed so much, but the importance of these two fields can never be retarded. You should not leave them blank or all same.

Try to put the best possible and crispy things over those fields. Always have your primary keyword or phrases in them.

Add Graphics

Adding graphics like pictures, videos, cartoons, etc. will boost your online presence of your website. It is always a good idea to share the pictures of your products, or service related pictures, or happy faces of your clients.

Never forget to add the alt tags for all these images. Many webmasters do the mistake of leaving them blank. For long run leaving them blank will harm your website.

Prefer Social Media Sharing Option

A few days back only Facebook celebrated their 10th birthday and you yourself have realized that during last 10 years social media has affected our life badly. In coming years, you won’t be able to ignore the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.

To get traffic from these social media sites, you must need to utilize those sites, and you also need to provide the option of social media like and share on your website.

The normal concept of search engines is that if a person likes a page, then he/she won’t hesitate in sharing or liking the same with their social media profiles. Thus this way they vote for your website and believe me Google count those signals.

Start Blogging

If you won’t be able to invest so much to a SEO Company for SEO campaigns, then you can focus on start the blogging by yourself on your own site. I am not saying that you should do it on a daily basis, but you might follow a regular plan to produce regular content on your website.

You might be able to prepare blogs on some products or services of your blog, like I suggested the same to Art Laureate and they started their own “the Kalaa Store blog”, and they share information about their products over there.

Start Earning Links for Your Website

Gone are the days when people use to do link building for their website, now we can go for earning links for our own website. As per Matt Cutts links from article directories are a waste now, while he also warned everyone not to use guest blogging for only link building purpose.

Forget about all the old techniques of building links like directory submission, social bookmarking, forum commenting, blog commenting, etc.

It’s not true that all these techniques are dead, you still can use them, but it should be performed in a better way now. You can go through some quality blog post related to your site, and you can post genuine comment over there with a link to your site, though remember to put your original name in the author name of the comment poster and the comment should also be generic one, depending on the content of that particular blog only.

Similarly you might also choose quality directory sites and you can put your sites detail over there, but don’t use the same anchor text and descriptions in all the directory sites. Rather you can genuinely put your business name as the display name over there.

Forget about article directory sites, as getting links through article directory sites was itself spammed badly by many so called SEO executives. They use to share a piece of content with 2-3 links to their website on so many websites, and then with the help of article syndication the same article reached to plenty of cheap websites. Instead of going for this, you should use guest blogging as the best way to build authority and earning links to your website.

Those who are following me and my blogs on a regular basis are already aware that my book on Guest Blogging is coming to hit the market very soon. Stay tuned to my blogs or my Twitter account to get more info about its launch.

Consult the Experts for Any Help

So the bottom line of the story is that you can also do SEO of your website by yourself only, but in fact when it comes about doing SEO, don’t think much. You can always consult some real SEO expert and invest some amount to get the ultimate benefits for your website.

Always remember a professional help is always better, weather you need to pay for it. If you consider me as a knowledgeable person, then you might also contact me for any SEO help or need. Especially if your website got penalized by Google, then you should always contact a professional guy to let it recover from it.

Being said that I am finishing this blog, and am waiting for your comments or feedback on it in the form of comments.