4 Important SEO Steps for Every Small Business Website

SEO can seem like a daunting process for many small business owners. You may not be sure what the most important SEO steps are for you to take. That depends upon your business’ goals, however, we do think that these 5 important SEO steps can help every small business.

Up the +1 and Like – Lots of small businesses use WordPress plugins and Facebook content boxes and such to make their blog posts easier. With the emphasis that search engines are placing on social signals, one way to get even more social juice is to add the native Google +1 button and the native Facebook Like or Share button to the main or secondary header sections on every page of your site. This way you can increase the odds of your homepage and other core pages accumulating more social signals over time. It’s easy to add this content to your webpages. You can get the code for the Google +1 button and Facebook button by clicking on the appropriate links.

Embed larger images. This isn’t technically an SEO move, but it can add to better engagement on social networks which will help your SEO. In fact, social signals are becoming crucial to improve your SEO. A recent Facebook redesign places a lot of emphasis on images on pages by displaying them fully across a post – if they meet certain size guidelines. The enlarged images make your post stand out on mobile devices as well as laptops and should be something you include in your content. The new standards call for images that are 600 to 1200 pixels in width.

Go after long tail keywords. One of the most important SEO steps for a small business website is to focus on long tail keywords. Short tail keywords have more competition and are harder to rank for. You usually come up against bigger corporations who have more money to spend when you compete for the short keywords. The less competition you face; the better chances you have to be highly ranked in search engines for that term. The higher you are ranked, the more likely you will be found. The truth is that individuals doing long tail keyword searches are usually closer to making a purchase than those using short tail keywords . Long tail keywords are more specific and show a true interest in your niche or product.

Add micro data to rich snippets. Micro data is a form of HTML property mark-up used specifically by search engines to help them identify certain kinds of text like addresses, movie titles and product descriptions. Micro data is crucial for straight ecommerce sites and its use will increase over time for just about every type of business. Adding name, address and phone (NAP) rich snippets to every page, for example, is a solid bit of advice for local businesses.

Build authority relationships. Networking for link relationships has taken on a bit of popularity due to Google’s emphasis on authority when it comes to content. Links from sites that Google ranks highly have always been important, but now individuals inside of Google + carry a great deal of weight as well. It’s important to build relationships in your industry with those authors that Google already thinks highly of.
If you can take these important SEO steps, your small business will be far ahead in the SEO game. For more information on SEO for small business, please keep checking out our blog. We blog about small business SEO often.