SEO Intro for Small Business Owners

Businesses love acronyms, and social media and the internet are no exception. In fact, there are even more acronyms to be found. The largest of which is SEO.

So what is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is the process of building web and social media traffic through the organic search process. Unlike ads, SEO is done through the free process of sharing information and using different methods to improve ranking and position in search results. Let’s break this down some more.

Building Content

Content is the easiest thing for a business to control, because it is the written word and images on a website. High quality, well written content makes a website desirable for both customers and search engines. Focus on hot topics and current events. The best way to write is to use words and phrases that you want to be found for. The content on your website is your web identity for which people will know you.

Being an Architect

The way search engines work is through crawling a website. This is the process by which robots search the internet and index what they find. If content is the most important part of building your SEO, building an easily accessible website is the second biggest part. Beyond the crawling process, it is important to make sure your website is easily available across all platforms. This means having a strong mobile site and a website that loads quickly no matter from where people access it. The more people access the site the higher your ranking.

Using HTML

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, and it is a cornerstone of the existence of the internet. The best ways to use HTML when it comes to SEO is to use keywords in links, headers, and descriptions. Example: if you are a hamburger food truck then you want to make sure you include the words hamburger, food truck, and dining in the aforementioned areas. There is more to HTML, but these are the key ways it plays into SEO.

SEO sounds intimidating to many people who don’t work with it regularly. In fact, it is one of the hardest concepts for many business owners, because it is so abstract and changes daily. It is frustrating to build an incredible webpage for your business only to have it show up on page ten of search results because you haven’t paid attention to the finer points of SEO.

Over the next few weeks we will be exploring SEO more and giving you pointers on how to build a website that is attractive to search engines.

Hiring professionals is one way to make sure this gets done well. At BizSwoop we have a dedicated team of SEO and social media mavens who can do the work for you or walk you through the process in more of a consulting role. Either way, we are confident we can help you.