If you’re small, chances are that you don’t have a ton of resources to focus solely on SEO. But neglecting it can be even more costly. Here are a few tips to make your small business visible in the search engines and stay there for the long haul.
When you create your website you will want people to be able to find your term online. To do this, you have to put content onto your site that is relevant to what you want to be found for. So for example, if you are making a website about gun control, then have those words in your website “i.e.: The best tips on gun control are as follows…”
Google more and more so is caring about not just content, but a users experience. Many elements of their algorithm now focus on not just having the right information, but how easy is it to get to the right information. Have your most important things quickly accessible, use headings (h1, h2 tags). Simply include the elements of good website design.
This does not mean that you need to make changes to content already created, it simply means to add more content on a regular basis. Give visitors a reason to come back, and it will also give the search engines a reason to entice users to come back by bumping you up in the rankings. Blog regularly.
Run your website like a business, not an SEO tool. If you overoptimize, that can actually work against you – it will raise red flags to Google saying “These guys are trying to manimpulate us!” So even if your site is “quality” they’ll punish you for your over-attempts. Search engines want the best sites to show up by virtue of them being the best sites, not because you tricked them into thinking so. Google can pull the rug from under your feet in a second – they did it to me.
With Google’s latest update, this is a touchy subject. You want incoming links to your website with good text as the link (anchor text). This will tell Google what your site is all about. But they don’t want you to make the links, they want to make viewers create the links. A typical viewer will not create a link which is related to your “money term” they’ll make a random looking link. So if you want to duplicate what your random viewers will do, you must also be random.
If you’re not going to be social on your social media, don’t bother. But it is my oppinion that search engines are going to continually glean more and more social information about the quality of a website. The social aspect brings an element in which their robots are not able to duplicate – and that’s the human element. So have your social profiles only if you are going to be social – otherwise your actual audience will get tired of you. By social, I mean interactive and engaging. Have a conversation
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This is not meant to be a vain post, not in the sort of way that Ramses is #1 in Nacho Libre. This is simply saying that I am now #1 in Google when you search for the term Kirk Salisbury. And interestingly enough, I’m pretty much the only person that ever Google’s Kirk Salisbury. But still, it gives me a sense of accomplishment! I had to dethrone some .gov reference to a Kirk Salisbury in California who was going through some sort of court issues. So, thank you all for your support – I couldn’t have done it without you!
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How about these great results for doing an SEO competition? We are close to dethroning the #1 spot who boats being a king in just under two weeks. Depending on what computer you search from, we are dominating the top 5, with at least two of our pages always the #3 or #4 spots. That’s pretty awesome. I wonder what will happen when this person who is demonstrating how awesome his websites are at a seminar, googles the term “Mukilteo Waterfront Homes” and he sees that he is not #1 again, but instead I’ve taken over both the #1 and #2 spots, and then one of our blogposts at a place like McGrawrealtrygroup.com is #3.
Okay, so maybe that’s to dreaming. But this is looking likely that we will be number one any day… It’s only taken us two weeks to get this far!
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As explained before, when I took on this challenge, I created two different pages. The first page was an internal WordPress page, and the second was an external IDXbroker account page – both focus on waterfront homes. The WordPress page has some content about waterfront homes, the IDX one contains listings of waterfront homes, and no content that I actually wrote.
When the page first ranked #6, only a day later, it was the IDX page which we did our social media blasting. It was a great immediate result. That page is now #16, and has been taken over.
What’s interesting is that page was taken over by the other page I created, so now at #6 is the internal WordPress page which has some of the quality websites which have sent links to it, and a UAW article written about it.
So, I’m still happy with the progress – washingtonrealestatesearch is ranking well!
Oh, and my website now has a page rank of 1! That means that I’ve got lots of links coming in. Maybe I should blog about that too.
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Yesterday I created the page, and I created a spin article and did a few links to my Mukilteo Waterfront Homes page. It will take a while for most of those links to ever be found by Google, which is part of the key to make me rank better. You see, I’m having my article about waterfront homes submitted to three different websites on the internet each day. It may take the Googlebot a month, two months to crawl those, but it will notice that all over the web people are posting about my website, which Google will see as natural links to the page instead of a “spam bot.”
On the other hand, we climbed incredibly quickly to the front page. In less than one day we’ve got the #6 spot, and that’s because of the social bookmarking tools that Alan, my boss, submitted. Also, here’s a good side note. We actually have two different pages that we made. The first one was the page that I made yesterday, and the second one was another page that I made yesterday which shows only listings. Let’s see which one Google likes more in the long run (it likes this one more right now in the short run) Mukilteo Waterfront Houses.
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This is a competition that I’m having with me and IMSB who suggests ActiveRain… a real estate blog who suggests hosting your real estate blog on their website. Here is the claim that IMSB is making about ActiveRain:
We recommend ActiveRain. From an online marketing perspective, the entire point of writing a blog is to be found on Google by buyers or sellers. A good blog post can bring you a steady stream of leads for years to come. Want proof? Look what happens when we Google “Mukilteo Waterfront Homes”… this Ben Kinney blog post from 2007 still tops the FREE search results.
It might not be easy, because I’m sure if they are going to advertise that, they’re probably prepared for people like me. The site has age, almost five years of it… so for me to take that over, I’ve got to be good.
But here we go, stop by and check out my page Mukilteo Waterfront Homes.
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My name is Kirk Salisbury, and welcome to my website kirksalisbury.com. I live in beautiful Logan, UT
and work as a web designer
SEO specialist and
internet marketer
at Boomerang Leads.