Search Engine Optimization or Google SEO

SEO is the continual process of optimizing your website and online presence to drive more traffic to your business through organic search results.  The underlying principle is to build great content for your users.  Organize the content in a logical fashion for your users and search engine robots who’ll visit and index your site and then improve the page rank of your site by getting great quality links from respectable websites back to your website.  This process needs to be repeated for all of your content and each of your targeted keywords for your business.

You should use SEO best practices for national campaigns or for improved Local SEO results.

I do SEO consulting for many types of small business clients.  The posts on these pages are from questions, comments or my own informational discovery as part of optimizing my clients sites for what I like to call Google SEO.  Some of the pages and posts are labeled “Members”.  These posts are only visible if you belong to my Members Only area.

Any items that include “Google SEO”, means that these concepts have been confirmed through some type of Google informational research.  One of the best beginner resources is Google SEO Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.  You should also consider using Google Analytics to better understand your website traffic and Google Webmaster Tools to help with the Google SEO analysis of your website.

It’s always best to follow White Hat SEO best practices.  In general they conform to Goolge SEO guidelines and will not get your site or pages black listed by the search engines.  You should understand White Hat SEO Versus Black Hat SEO before you start optimizing or hire someone to optimize your website.

Local SEO

Local SEO focuses your efforts on returning local search traffic to your website or business.  We have a Local SEO program that helps small business optimize for local search results.  We’re so confident in our process, that I guarantee a front page listing.

SEO Getting Prepared

Page Optimization for SEO

Each page on your website should have a unique page title tag and page description meta tag.  Google may use your page title and page description for their snippet in returned search results.  Google may also change your page snippet as they learn about your website page.

Make sure you page content is optimized for the keyword phrase used on that page.  Watch this keyword page content video on how to optimize your page keywords based on SEO best practice.

Increase SEO traffic with Optimized Image Tags both in the picture file name and the ALT TXT.  An image is added to your website using  <IMG SRC>.

Website Optimization for SEO

Stay away from flash content on your website – Google SEO says it’s best to not use flash content on your website.

How Can I Avoid Comment Spam on my Website – Turn on a reCAPTCHA, moderate your comments, don’t allow comments and other ideas to prevent and clean comment spam from your website.

Make user you understand how noindex and nofollow meta tags are used in your website’s robots.txt and/or in your page meta tags.

Link Building for SEO

Link Anchor Text – is the text you click on that takes you to the linked page.  In this case this text is the  Link Anchor Text .  Note that it should use the keyword of the page your are linking to, so in this case it’s linking to my page titled “What is Link Anchor Text”.  All links on your site and back links to your site should include descriptive, contextual based anchor text.  This is what Google SEO likes for good link anchor text.

You may want to prepare for linking by building link description templates for important keywords.

Dealing with Low Quality Backlinks to your website – best answer don’t deal with them or worry about it.

SEO Directory Submission

Register your business on Google Local to find local customers to your business.

SEO Linking Requests

Simple Link Request Letter to help build your Google SEO page rank.

Use Your Friends and Customers for Referral Marketing of your Business.  Ask them for backlinks to your website and of course new customers.

SEO Link Building Best Practices