SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the technical term for how can I get on the first page/s of a google search?
SEO is a crucial part of developing and maintaining an effective website. A favourite question of SEO specialists is something like this:
“What’s the use of this great looking website if nobody ever visits it?”.
And it’s quite true, without the search engines’ help, nobody is going to visit your site except if you continuously spend money on other forms of advertising. The problem is that with what some people charge for SEO it may actually make sense to go with those other forms of advertising. Most small businesses can’t justify those large sums of money and just need some basic optimisation.
Before you begin SEO work it is important to think about the goals for your website.
see What are the marketing goals for my website? for examples.
Once you have worked out your marketing goals we can together work on some SEO goals for your website.
Entry Level SEO
Here are some areas that you can begin to work on:
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Keyword research
Choosing your battles.
It is best to start small and then work towards the higher competition keywords.For example, aiming to rank high on google for “auckland firewood” is going to be harder than ranking for ” firewood for pizza ovens”. Firewood for pizza ovens has much less competition and it will be easier to rank highly for that and may lead, with less effort, to more business. Once a business is ranking highly for some niche key word phrases like “firewood for pizza ovens”, then the main keyword phrase for your business area can be worked on. Choose your battles carefully especially when starting out.
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On-page optimization
See my article on page optimization for search engines
This is something I do right now with little cost to help with your rankings on the search engines. I use Yoast’s SEO plugin. -
Back links
Getting links from other sites to your site. I use this book to guide me it making a strategy for your website:
Ultimate Guide to Link Building: How to Build Backlinks, Authority and Credibility for Your Website, and Increase Click Traffic and Search Ranking By Eric Ward -
Social media
Spreading the word through Facebook, twitter and other important social sites. A would recommend these books to get you started:
Social Media for WordPress: Build Communities, Engage Members and Promote Your Site by Michael Kuhlmann
and for nonprofits: Social media for social good : a how-to guide for nonprofits by Heather Mansfield. -
Content strategy.
Adding fresh valuable content to your website with a plan eg for a small business it might be what you blog about .
See http://www.antemeridiemdesign.com/articles/3-content-strategy-basics-for-small-businesses.php for a basic overview. This book: The elements of Content Strategy will be way beyond what most small businesses need, but it is available at Auckland Library for a quick skim. I’m currently doing this course at Lynda.com: Creating Effective Content Strategy Your Website.
And for all things SEO, you can’t go far wrong by reading the SEO Moz Blog.
Need a new website with search engine optimisation included?
Build Your Website’s $500 package includes some SEO already so that you don’t have to worry about this stuff. While you can do all this yourself, it is time consuming and probably has nothing to do with your business’s day to day operation. Let us handle all this for you.
Hello there! This is my first visit to your blog! We are a collection of
volunteers and starting a new project in a community in the same niche.
Your blog provided us useful information to work on.
You have done a marvellous job!
Good day! Do you know if they make any plugins to assist
with Search Engine Optimization? I’m trying to get my blog to rank for some targeted keywords but I’m not
seeing very good results. If you know of any please share.
Many thanks!
I like Yoast’s SEO plugin.