Local Internet Advertising Guide

Getting links to your site is an important off page factor.

The text in the links that link to your businesses website help the search engines to determine what your website is about. When people are searching for businesses online, research shows that they don’t search for ‘business directories’ they search for what they are looking for, for example ‘plumbers in sheffield’

So as a business you want to make sure your getting links to your site which describe your business the best. In our example, a plumber would want as many links as possible to their site which contain the text ‘plumbers in sheffield’ as this is what people are searching for.

Getting links to your site can be done many ways. To summerise :

• You can upgrade on business listings sites to get an inbound link to your site.
• You can offer to swap a link with a business. You can do this by contacting the owner of the site and offering to do this.
• You can  pay an SEO business to buid links to your site.

Upgrading you listing in an online directory site will often get you a link back to your website. This is a great way to get a link and more exposure.

Paying an SEO or web design company to build links for you will be more expensive and be an ongoing cost, but the returns will show with a consistent effort. Many SEO companies offer link building services and you can discuss this with them in detail. The more relevant those links are to your site, the more relevant Google will consider them, and the better your SEO will be.

Thanks,

Steve

Many (including me) see SEO as being split into two areas. One is ‘off page factors’, and one is ‘on page factors’.

Today I’m going to talk about on page factors. When someone says ‘on page’ they mean the pages of your website. The factors part relates to things about the content of the site which the search engines will find appealing, and enable them to better understand the content of your site.

Take a minute to go to the ‘View’ menu in your internet browser. You’ll see that there is an option which says ‘View Source’ or ‘View Page Source’. If you click on this an new window with open which shows all the code of the page you are looking at. This is the code that the search engines read in order to understand and categorise your businesses website. Not all websites are created equal, so lets look at what makes a site best for a search engine to understand.

META content provides information about your site to the search engines. Meta is organised into tags that look like this:

<META name=“Description” content=“A description of your business”>
<META name=“Keywords” content=“Keywords that are relevant to your business”>
<META name=“Rating” content=“General”>
<META name=“Robots” content=“all”>
<META name=“Language” content=“English”>

The most important parts to help you get better positions in the search engines are the Description and Keywords tags, and I’ll be describing how to get the most out of these in a later post.

Thanks,

Steve

Many people have come to my business in the past and asked how get they can get higher positions in search engines for people searching for keywords that relate to their business. This is a question that many businesses answer by baffling their prospective customers with science, and encoraging them to part with a lot of money over an extended period.

Some SEO companies will offer to guarantee you a top position, avoid these at all costs, others will be more honest and tell you its not an exact science, and that they will need to spend a lot of time and effort on achieving results for you. Wouldn’t it be good if you could save some money and help yourself?

Lets get down to some basics:

• SEO involves enabling the content of your site being best organised and presented for the search engines to look at your site, and understand what it contains. This is something that is easy to implement once, but for optimal results, takes a short amount of time on a regular basis.
• SEO is also about making sure that the links to your site from other websites contain text that relates to the content of your site.
• SEO involves making sure that you are focussing on getting traffic for the searches that you want to be found, by making sure that your sire contains the right amount of content that relates those searches.
• SEO involves making sure that you update your content regularly so that you can present upto date information about your business to the search engines. The search engines will help you if you help them.

I aim to help local businesses by providing details of the things you should be thinking about, whether you want to do some SEO for yourself, or need some help choosing a company to do your local Internet advertising for you.

Thanks,

Steve