SEO 101 for Business Owners [infographic]

For most people, especially small business owners, trying to figure out Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is like trying to solve The Rubiks Cube.

Google uses over 200 factors when determining the ranking of a web page for a particular search query.  Unless you're doing SEO as a profession, there is no way to keep track of every factor…..they are always changing.  Even us professionals in the web marketing space have trouble keeping up with all of the changes.

As a business owner, you don't have alot of time to spend worrying over SEO, but if your website is an important part of your business you will need to pay some attention to it.  Doing a few hours of research should at least give you a basic understanding of what SEO is, and what you should and shouldn't do when it comes to gaining rankings.  If you don't have time to dedicate to learning more, or don't want to, go find someone who knows what they are doing as you can waste alot of time…or get yourself into trouble with the search engines if you don't handle your SEO correctly.

I highly recommend anyone getting started in learning about SEO read The Beginners Guide to SEO from SEOMoz

SEO is broken down into 3 parts: T.L.C.

Technical – These are the things you do on the backend of your website such as your site structure, site speed, your title tags and meta descriptions just to name a few.  These things form the framework for your SEO plan and if this part is broken, it'll be difficult to get the rankings you want.

Links – These are external factors that influence your search engine rankings.  Everytime another website links back to your website, the search engines look at it as a form of referral for your website.  All links are not created equal.  Factors such as the referring domains quality, their relevancy compared to your site and the context of where the link is placed on the page, all play a role in determining the strength of that link.

Content – These are the words you have on your website.  Factors that play in this area are the amount of content on your site, the quality of it (are people sharing and linking to it), and the keywords on the page…..what the page is about.

To get a quick visual introduction to SEO, take a look at this infographic courtesy of Rise Interactive.  Take note of the “what not to do's” at the bottom, those are outdated and frowned upon tactics that can potentially get you de-indexed from the search engine rankings if you're not careful.

seo 101 for small business owners

 

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Gary

CEO at 3Bug Media
Gary Shouldis is the founder of 3Bug Media, a web marketing company that helps businesses create 360 Marketing Strategies to dominate their market. His blog is read by over 20 thousand small business owners a month and has been featured in the N.Y. Times Small Business, Business Insider and Yahoo Small Business.