In the first post of this series Want to SEO Your Small Business Website? I’ll Save You Tons – Part One we explained how to choose your keywords and showed you how to implement them into your website with a great how-to video. Now, we will discuss the importance of content and showed you what you needed to generate and how to do it.
The Next Step: Add Great Content to Your Website
If you didn’t already know this, the biggest factor in SEO is your website’s content. You must have great, unique content. If you have this then Google will eat up your site and rank your website very high. Ever wonder why Wikipedia is always the first search result? It has tons and tons of unique content. So, now you know. What you need to focus on is how you are going to turn your startup business website into the Wikipedia equivalent of your specific industry. Here’s how:
1. Write a unique article for each keyword
- Each article should have 350-400 words. You should mention the keyword 3-4 times per article. DO NOT STUFF THE ARTICLE WITH KEYWORDS, or Google will penalize you. This was an old trick that no longer works.
- The keyword should be a “heading 1”. To the search engines, this further reinforces that this page is about your keyword.
- The keyword should be in other headings too, if applicable. For example, if you have or can create sub headings to your article using “heading 2” or “heading 3” using more instances of your keywords, go for it. For example:
Heading 1 = Article About Web Design California
Heading 2 = Options for Web Design California
Heading 3 = Pricing for Web Design California
- Make sure these articles are linked directly from your homepage and preferably on every other page of your new business website. This means that if I am on your home page, I should be able to find a link to these articles, and the anchor text of these links must be the keyword itself. Preferably, you can have an “articles” page in your navigation and then all of these articles can be listed as sub-pages. Sometimes you have a website that isn’t as flexible and you might need to put these article links in your footer. This should be a last resort. Either way, try to make sure they are implemented site wide. If you only implement them on your home page, they won’t have as much of an impact because you are in essence telling the search engines that “these pages are not valuable enough to link all over my site”. Likewise, if you put them in your footer, you are saying “these pages weren’t important enough to put in my main navigation”.
2. Start a Blog
- Add new content once per week about your keywords. This means that you should either add pages to your new business website, or write blog posts. If you are writing blog posts, Ideally, the keyword should be mentioned in the title of the posts (this should always be a “heading 1” or in the code, an <h1> tag). This will give you the most SEO benefit.
- Make sure you add a page title, meta keywords & description to each post.
- Make sure the content is so good and useful, that people link to it from external websites. These are called backlinks. A big part of your ranking position will be determined by how many people are linking to your online business website, and how big of an authority each website is that is providing the backlink. Just one backlink from a high authority site can be equal to over a hundred from low authority sites. In order to move up in your Google rankings, you not only need backlinks, but backlinks where the anchor text is your exact keyword.
3. Reinforce your keywords anywhere on your website by linking them
If a keyword is in your content on any page or blog post, it should always link to the main page for that keyword. This “reinforces” your keyword by telling the search engines that “I am linking to this page, because this page is about this keyword”. You only need to do this one time on a given page. For example, if our keyword appeared 2 or 3 times on a given page, I would only link it once – the first time it appeared on that page. If you do it more than that, it will look spammy. So don’t do it. The overall point here is that every time you write an article or a blog post, and you reference any of your keywords, you will want to link that keyword to its main page.
If you have followed all of these steps and continue building content under the parameters I have recommended, then you’ve saved yourself a ton of money by completing your “on-site SEO” on your own. At this point, in a couple of weeks or months, you should be able to see your website ranking on Google for your keywords. Despite the fact that you might be ranking in the #50 position or higher, this is a good sign. You are on the right track.
But, on-site SEO is only half the battle. You’re going to need a ton of quality backlinks to reach the top 5 of Google.
In the next and final post in this series, Want to SEO Your Small Business Website? I’ll Save You Tons – Part Three, I’ll show you how to tackle the final and ongoing step in the SEO process: backlinks.