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The increasingly competitive and innovative world of small business search engine optimization (SEO) is the most important factor for a website to get off the ground and then stay off it. Search engines are the first places people go when looking for something they want (or want to know) on the Internet, making SEO by far the most crucial thing to consider when starting your website.
Common sense tells you that the higher your small business website appears on a search engine's results list, the better it is for your site. A high ranking means more traffic to your website, and more traffic means only good things. You can't make any money if no one is visiting your site, so therein lays your first step.
Consider your website's SEO ranking to be similar to a resume. A person's resume isn't there to get them the job; it's there to get them the interview. Likewise, a good SEO ranking won't sell your website (or product) for you, but it will get people to take a look. That being said, how do you improve your SEO ranking? Having a good SEO ranking is, as the old saying goes, easier said than done, but there are a few basic ways to help improve it:
Web Design - Your small business web design is probably the most important aspect when considering SEO. Search engines use spiders to scan through and search your website, so having an organized, simplistic and informative web design is essential to your SEO. When designing your website, you want to keep your content relevant and your distractions (large images, media players etc.) to a minimum. Both search engines and readers should be able to effectively scan your website and find what they are looking for.
Tags - Whether it be Title tags or Meta tags, they are almost as important as Web Design. Title tags are what appear at the top of the browser when the page is displayed and is what the search engines show for the first line of the site link when they show their results. Search engines place a lot of importance on Title tags, and so should someone developing their website. Meta tags, on the other hand, serve to describe the various aspects of your website. Keywords are important here, since that is what the search engine is looking for first. Meta tags have three components: the title, the Meta Description and the Meta keywords. When matching a phrase or keywords, search engines first try to find it within the Meta tags of the sites within their databases. Simply put: Meta tags are a way to flag your web pages for the search engines.
A website with good SEO is better than online advertising - it generates more traffic and, better yet, it's free. Hundreds of dollars of online advertising may only generate a handful of hits a day to your website, but appearing near the top of a search engine's results can produce hundreds of hits a day. So, hundreds of dollars to get a few hits in comparison to no money for hundreds of hits leads to a fairly simple conclusion: improve your website's SEO before anything else.
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