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If you’ve been focusing solely on building your business, you may quickly find out, that few of your potential customers know who you are, or where to find you. This is when SEO (Search Engine Optimization) becomes the lifeline of your business. SEO is the art and science of having a website rank highly on search engines’ organic (free) results.

Get Friendly with SEO

Making your website SEO-friendly may be the single most important thing you can do to market your business.  It can mean the difference between having your business show up on page 5 of Google or some other search engine – the equivalent of being in Siberia – and page 1, front and center. And even if you already know that your website needs to be SEO-friendly, you may have tried to infuse a lot of key words into your copy, only to find you’re still ranking somewhere around page 3.

There are actually several factors that contribute toward elevating your SEO ranking, and when possible, all of the websites Solutions for Growth builds or improves for its clients contain these elements. In fact, we recently conducted SEO site changes for a dentist and painter who had already-established sites, and our improvements landed both of their websites on Google’s first page!

Caution: Technical But Crucial Info Ahead

Following is a list of some actions you can take to optimize your SEO ranking. This information tends to be technical, but it’s very important for the small-business owner. It is by no means an exhaustive list, but it does provide some of the priority items you’ll want to pursue:

• Write excellent content. Most people have become so SEO-focused that the need for excellent content has been forgotten. The fact is, your SEO may get prospects to your site, but it’s your content that will keep them there.
• Strive for keyword density. Keyword density means you repeat key words as often as possible, without cluttering your content with unnecessary words. For example, you don’t want to make it SEO obvious that you’re striving for better SEO in this SEO-focused world. (Get the picture?) This is a tightrope walk, but it’s important to balance the two.
• Incorporate Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). To put it simply, LSI is based on the principal that words used in the same context tend to have similar meanings, so if, for example, you are selling skillets, you would want to incorporate as many other terms that might be used in the same context, such as fry pans, fryers, saucepan, etc., to be sure that you’re not missing any possible queries.
• Put your keywords in your URL. This may not always be possible, depending on the name of your company or website, but it is very helpful in SEO.
• Use keywords in the names of directories.
• Use keywords when choosing a domain name.
• Convert the Flash code to HTML code. If you have Adobe Flash on your website – a multimedia platform that adds animation and video – it is a wasted opportunity from a search perspective. Flash does not enable you to include ALT tags that give you the option to insert key words behind images (so that when an image does not appear, the keywords appear instead). A best practice is to convert the Flash code to HTML code, allowing you to add keywords to the ALT tags in the HTML code. As an added benefit of converting from Flash to HTML, your prospects will be able to see your websites better on an Apple device (otherwise they’ll see a blank space).
• Put your menu at the top of your web page. Google favors easy top navigation and the order of a website’s menus usually dictates the page importance, relevance, hierarchy and main keywords.
• Use a reputable web host. You don’t want to share your web space hosting with a server that is unreliable, spam and virus-prone, or hosts adult-theme websites. Like the old saying, “You are the company you keep.”

At Solutions for Growth, we specialize in creating dynamic websites that are SEO-friendly and highly SEO-effective.

We also conduct reviews of websites to determine how to dramatically improve their rankings on search engines. Contact us today to get your business on the front page of your prospects’ next search. You’ve got to stand out above the crowd, and show them you and your business are the obvious choice.

I look forward to seeing you at one of the events or speaking with you about your marketing needs.

All the best,

David Fischer