SkyMax Blog | Search Engine Optimization (SEO) For Business Owners

Follow an easy 10 step process to ensure you increase search engine rankings for your business website.

1. Utilize a Keyword Relevant Domain Name

Before jumping into your domain name purchase, seek a URL that has relevant keywords to your company, products and services. Ensure that your main domain name is relevant to your company, and that your sub domains are not long and full of confusing characters and numbers. This only confuses the search spiders as well as your visitors.

2. Keyword Relevant Title Tags and META Tags

This is an important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO). Not only for the search engines sake, but for your prospects as well. This is the first impression prospects will have of your SEO copywriting skills to flawlessly include important keywords while sounding natural. This is also the first impression that search spiders and prospects will have of what your company is all about. This is your free advertising space, so take full advantage! Including company name and your targeted keywords, and ensure that every page has unique title and META tags.

3. Site Architecture and Ease of Navigation

Your visitors certainly will not remain on your site very long if it’s difficult to navigate through. Even worse, the more confusing and broken links to your site, the less likely that a search spider will fully crawl and index all of your vital pages. Submit a sitemap to Google every time you make critical site changes.

4. Use HTML – Not Flash!

Search spiders have a difficult time reading any code other than HTML. Flash animations and video are not crawled, so search spiders rely solely on tags and descriptions for this type of content. Large, well known companies are typically not affected by this, but small companies trying to improve their rankings and make a name for themselves should ensure they are using HTML.

5. Develop Your Website With Your Prospects In Mind

Although it sounds obvious, it’s something I see quite often on the internet. Newcomers to internet marketing write and organize their website for the search spiders in an attempt to increase search engine rankings. Traffic that flows through the site is often confused and bombarded with repetitive words and phrases. Remember that your prospects hold the purchasing power, not the search spiders.

6. Include Quality Content

Content is what the search spiders use to determine the relevancy of your website to your chosen topic or industry. Quality, keyword rich content is key, but be careful not to over stuff your keywords. The result is unnatural, and ultimately you will incur search engine penalties. Ensure your content flows smoothly, is created with your prospects in mind, then add keywords and keyphrases where it makes sense to do so.

7. Regularly Include Fresh New Content

Search engine rankings rely on fresh, new content being added on a constant basis. Search engines do not want old and outdated content on their search engine results pages (SERPS), so make sure to update your content on a regular basis. Grammatical changes, graphics and page additions all count towards new content. Failure to maintain fresh content will result in your search engine rankings slowly slipping away from your desired results.

8. Add a Blog Within Your Site

Both search spiders and humans love blogs, as they’re properly structured and a great tool for keeping your visitors up to date with your products and services. Blogs and blog posts get indexed in the seach engines very quickly, as spiders see this information as freshly updated content. Before jumping into blogging, it’s best to follow and participate in your industry related blogs to understand a little more how they work, and if it’s right for you and your company.

9. Acquire Quality Backlinks

Acquiring quality backlinks to your website is one of the most valuable tools to increase search engine rankings. Backlinks are viewed by the search engines as a vote from one site to another, so the more backlinks to your site, the more popular the search engines think your site is. It’s important to understand that the quality of the site that is linking to you has a direct impact on your rankings. If your backlinks consist of mostly low PR sites, spam archived sites, or irrelevant sites, your website will be perceived as having the same type of value.

10. Total Number of Backlinks

Backlinks are so important to your SEO success that it’s worth 2 steps in this top 10 list. Although you want to strive for quantity of backlinks, you also want to keep in mind that quality plays a bigger role than quantity. Link farms, spam sites and paid links are all detrimental to your site success, no matter the quantity involved.