How do I search your website? SEO Rules you cannot ignore.

Recently I was searching one of my friend’s Website on virtual consultancy service. I knew she had a site, but could not remember the web address nor could find her business card anywhere. All I had was her name. So I thought of searching Google for her website basis her name. Result = Nada! Determined to find her website, I searched basis ‘virtual consultant Boston’ & ‘virtual consultancy services Boston’. Again I could not find her business. Well if you are in the consultancy business, I think it’s kinda obvious that your name should link back to your website. Search keywords describing your service for the respective geographic area such as “virtual consultancy services Boston” should also shoot results of your website. But here nothing of the sort was happening. I finally had to go through all my old emails and find her contact information. Upon speaking to her, I pointed out how difficult it was searching for her business website online. To which she replied in not so many words “Well, my Web designer said that people have to pay to be on the top and I don’t really want to pay for that.”

I was baffled. So as per what her designer said, you can only be found, if someone knows your name or your business name? But cannot be found if someone is searching for a virtual consultant in Boston? Sounds ridiculous! Well as a small business owner you need to immediately wake up and smell the coffee! People who go online to search are generally looking for answers to their problems. Most won’t know your name or your business name. How do you ensure they find you before you competitor?


Organic Search Engine Optimization does not require you to pay the search engine owners to bring your site to the top rankings. What organic SEO does, is makes your website more search crawler/robot friendly and follows the white hat ethical SEO rules laid down by top search engines. Generally good search sites like Google keeps updating its algorithm to improve search results and a good SEO firm will update and follow such guidelines accordingly.

Some basic must-dos to make your website SEO friendly:

• Ensure your website coding is clean. Remove extra CSS and Javascript. Get your site W3C (www.w3c.org) validated to make it search friendly. There are 100% validated websites out there, so trust me it can be done!
  
  
• Spend some time right at the onset to do a thorough keyword research. Believe me this is the basic ABC of SEO. Look for keywords in programs like Keyword Discovery, Overture, WordTracker and website logs. You should know which keywords; users will use to do a search for you. Like I typed ‘virtual consultant Boston’ to search for my client’s website.
  
  
• Now that you know which keywords to optimize write your content them. Ensure to write SEO friendly content. Use 2 or max 3 keywords phrases per webpage. Don’t confuse the search crawler by using too many different types of keywords and diluting all. To understand more about keywords read my previous post about The Tango between Keywords & Search Engine Crawlers Part I & Part II
  
  
• Make sure to include the keyword phrase in the title, the alt tags, and the body of content. Bold it; use it in links, in H1 tags
  
  
• Start building relevant incoming links to your website. This is part of organic SEO, and ensures more number of relevant linking to your site, will make your site more popular with search bots. You can do this via article posting, forums, blogs, reciprocal linking, directory submissions etc. All this is very time consuming and tedious, but essential for your long term Search Engine Optimization strategy. Above all be patient. It takes time but following the above basic steps will work in winning the war and being found online.

Go and type your site’s preferred keywords on search engine. Can you find your business in the top 10 listings…. Nope? Then you definitely need to pull up your socks and take SEO help from experts.

Write to me at mark@analytixsolutions.net to discuss any further questions you might have about how to get your website SEO done.