DOUG AND POLLY WHITE Special Correspondents
qUESTION: I just started a new business. I think it is critical for us to develop good search engine optimization (SEO) so that people can easily find us on the web. Do you have any tips on how to achieve this?
ANSWER: We agree, depending on your business, good SEO can be very valuable. There are many people promoting ways to trick search engines into finding your site. We advise staying away from these “get rich quick” schemes. First, because people, like the people at Google, are continually trying to make tricks not work, what works today may not work in three months. It’s a moving target. Second, if search engines find out you’re playing games, they’ll block you.
We find that consistency and quality are the keys to good SEO. That said, the details of how to create good SEO can be complex. At the risk of oversimplifying, we’ll offer five tips for creating good SEO.
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Choose a unique business name – You want people to be able to find you if they Google your business name or something close to it. If you choose a frequently used business name, this will be more difficult. For example, we initially named one of our companies Richmond Performance Group. Little choice, half the businesses in the area are called Richmond one way or another. We found that Whitestone Partners worked best for the name of our consulting business.
Build a solid website – Make sure your website describes exactly what you do, who you do it for, and how you do it. Use frequently searched terms in your descriptions. Embed the right metadata, which consists of strong page titles, good page descriptions, and the right meta tags. Remember that more is not always better. Loading up your site with hundreds of meta tags will hurt more than help – six to ten is probably a good rule of thumb. Metadata should use words that are frequently searched for, but should also tie very closely to the content of your website.
Embed a blog on your website – Add a high quality blog to your website. Make sure the blog is embedded on your website. If you let someone else, say Word Press, host your blog, you won’t create as much SEO when people visit it. Post regularly. For example, post once a week. Writing the blog posts yourself will require discipline, but it shouldn’t be too much of a challenge for most organizations. However, if you don’t have the time, you can request permission to use content written by others or hire a ghostwriter for a very reasonable price. No matter where you get your content from, make sure it’s high quality and relevant to what you do. The content of your blog posts should be consistent with what’s on your site. Make sure new content is flowing continuously. It is better to have a new post every week than to post 52 times in one week and let the blog sit idle for 51 weeks. Finally, make sure your titles contain highly searchable words and relate directly to the topic of the article.
Drive people to your website – Nothing builds organic SEO like a consistent stream of visitors to your website. We’ve had a lot of success using a continuous chain of automated tweets to advertise free content on our blog. Tweets go out about once every four hours. When people click to read the article, they go to the blog embedded on our website and improve our SEO. Obviously, this strategy will only work if you have a significant number of Twitter followers interested in the topics you’re writing about.
Make your site more searchable – Including a site map can be helpful. There are tools that qualified technicians can use to evaluate and improve the quality and searchability of your site.
Building and maintaining exceptional SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. However, in the right industry, it can be invaluable. The five tips above will set you on the right track.
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