by VITHIET KAK

There is no question today that small business owners can’t be competitive unless they have a website. But because of all this competition, having a website alone is not enough anymore. A website is no longer a nice addition to your business, coming after business cards and newspaper ads; it can actually be the most efficient tool at your disposal to market yourself, attract visitors and potentially turn them into customers. However, your site won’t do you any good unless you optimize it properly.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the combination of several techniques that can be applied to a website to make it more competitive on Search Engines like Google or Bing, thus improving its visibility. My recommendation, of course, is that you hire an expert SEO consultant to handle your site’s optimization. But if your site currently does not bring you additional business, then probably one or more of the following 5 points is the reason why.

1. Not the right keywords

Keyword strategy and keyword analysis are the foundation of SEO. They are the starting point for everything and targeting the wrong keywords can be the difference between having zero or thousands of visitors coming to your site daily! Note that by keyword, we really mean key phrases; keywords are generally (actually recommended) more than one word long. When selecting your keywords, keep in mind these general guidelines:
- Select a niche or two. Do you have a specialty? Do you target a specific population? What separates you from your competitors? Pick your keywords around those criteria
- If you are offering services or products locally, use a geographical word in, at least, one of your keywords (name of your city, region, county, state, nearest big city, etc…)
- Select long tail keywords. These are keywords that are not too popular (meaning not too competitive) but still generate a fair amount of searches. They should be 2 to 4 words long and follow the aforementioned guidelines (niche and local). A combination of common sense and data provided by the Google Keyword Tool should help in the selection process.

If you never thought about keyword analysis and strategy in those terms, no wonder your site under performs.

2. Content not optimized

In the SEO world, we always say “Content is King!” When Search Engines spiders come crawling your site, all that matters for them is your text. None of your elegant design, pretty color scheme or fancy Flash animations will help you get well ranked. So you should make sure to display original, interesting, informative and well-structured text on all your pages. But it’s only half the work. You might already have quality content on your site, but it’s ineffective if it’s not optimized using:
- Placement of your keyword in strategic parts of your text
- Some crucial html elements such as title tags, meta description and h1 tags, making sure they contain keywords
- Renaming of your pages and files used on your pages (images, pdf documents, etc..) to include keywords
- Alt text on images and captions around them which make them “visible” to spiders, to some extent, again including keywords.

Yes, optimizing your content revolves around the use of the keywords discussed in point 1. But be very careful! Overuse of those keywords is known as “keyword stuffing” and is badly penalized by Search Engines.

3. No inbound links

Good keywords and optimized content are the machinery that will push your site to higher rankings, but inbound links are the fuel that will power it. If you have not spent some time trying to get links to your site from other sites then it’s natural you are not getting any traffic. There are 2 benefits to inbound links: first, they will naturally bring you more visitors. Second, links from sites with good ranking and authority will make your site appear “more important” in the eyes of the Search Engines spiders, hence giving you better chances at higher rankings. A greater number of inbound links is good, but do not compromise quality for quantity! A few links from well-respected sites are much better than a 1000 links from “bad sites”. How do you tell if a site is “bad”? A few pointers:
- Poor or no content
- No consistency in design, ugly design and/or colors, etc…
- Random listing of links with no categorization
- Asking for money in exchange of links; some “good” directories do it, but they offer you a listing, not just a simple link, and they don’t have any of the 3 previous points.

The most valuable inbound links you can get are from .gov and .edu domains, but unless your site has a direct relation with education or the government, chances to get links on such sites are very slim.

4. No local optimization

Even if you are selling services or products nationally or internationally, it’s always a good idea to optimize your site based on your location. Local search is gaining more weight everyday, and having your site appearing in the local section of Search Engines can be a huge advantage. To do so, you should first make sure that somewhere on your site you mention your address and phone number. But this address can’t be a P.O. box, and the phone number has to be a local number (no 1 800 or 1 888). Then when you work on your inbound link building campaign, submit your site to local directories such as Google Local or Superpages.

5. Inefficient landing page

A lot of people think that SEO stops with getting your site well ranked in Search Engines and getting a lot of traffic on your site, and that includes a lot of SEO professionals. The truth is, the end goal of SEO is to increase conversion. You want visitors to convert into customers. There are a lot of different techniques that can be used for this but one of the best ones in my opinion is AIDA, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Act. It’s an effective marketing technique that’s been around since the 1920’s, and it applies very well to Web design. Basically, make sure to organize your Home page following this principle for the most efficient impact on your visitors:
- Attract their Attention with a short paragraph or statement they will see right away and confirms they found what they are looking for
- Raise their Interest; often the mistake here is to list features of products or services. Instead, present those features in terms of benefits for the reader: what do they gain from it?
- Persuade them they Desire what you have to offer by explaining how it will help them
- Finally, get them to Act by making your call-to-action very prominent: phone number if your goal is to get calls, button to purchase if you are selling something on the site, etc…

If you decide to take a pass at doing SEO on your site by yourself, these 5 points should be a good starting point. Again, I recommend going to a professional as they will most likely be able to do it better and faster than you can, leaving you more time to focus on your actual business. But with your new SEO knowledge, you can now tell if they are covering all the bases!

Originally posted 2009-11-03 01:25:40. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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