Seo Tips

It’s day one of SMX and we’re ready to begin in the SEO track with a head to head, no holds barred battle between Google and Bing. Blood will be shed. Marketshares will be insulted. Mothers will weep and hide their children.

If your company has a bunch of store locations, please don’t hide that information behind a search form or a POST. If you want your store pages to be found, it’s best to have a unique, easily crawlable url for each store. Ideally, you would also create an HTML sitemap that points to the web pages for your stores (and each web page should have a unique url). If you have a relatively small number of stores, you could have a single page that links to all your stores. If you have a lot of stores, you could have a web page for each (say) state that links to all stores in that state.

The first thing you have to realize when using social media is that you can’t just delegate it to the youngest person on your staff and assume you will connect with your customer. If your customer is following you, they are going to need to feel they are interacting with someone near the top of the company food chain.

SEO is a foundation of a good site. It’s not something that should be offered as an add-on expense. A properly developed site will perform the best-practices basics of SEO from the start.

Search Engine Optimization is defined as, “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page (such as a blog) from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) which may deal with paid inclusion.”

Most professionals in the SEO industry are well versed in how to assess a site’s age. That’s been well documented. You can use any one of the fine SEO plug-ins out there. A fave of mine is SEO Book’s SEO for Firefox. But you could use Webconfs.com’s bulk domain age checker or go old skool with a good WhoIs service.

When it comes to your small business blog, do you care about search engine optimization?

I think many small business owners would like to have a better understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) but most are just too busy trying to run their venture and don’t necessarily have the time to learn.

When I started my business a few years ago, I knew if I was going to succeed I would have to get on to the front page of most major search engines. Subsequently, I began to read everything I could related to SEO.