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SEO for Small Business

Heather Acton
September 02, 2015

SEO for Small Business

Heather Acton

September 02, 2015
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  1. Agenda ✤ Introductions ✤ What is SEO? ✤ “On the

    Page” SEO ✤ “Off the Page” SEO ✤ SEO Tools & Resources
  2. Introductions ✤ Grew up in Lindenhurst, live in Lake Villa

    ✤ Mechanical engineer turned web developer & strategist ✤ 8+ years & approximately 100 small businesses served
  3. “On the Page” SEO - Content ✤ High quality ✤

    Well-researched ✤ Use key phrases naturally ✤ Fresh ✤ Vertical content ✤ Answers questions that may be asked in search ✤ Covers topic deeply
  4. “On the Page” SEO - Architecture ✤ Search engines should

    be able to easily crawl pages of your site ✤ Avoid table-based layouts and other outdated programming tactics ✤ Avoid overuse of Flash ✤ Avoid bloated computer-generated code (Dreamweaver, GoDaddy Website Tonight, etc.)
  5. “On the Page” SEO - Architecture ✤ Manage duplicate content

    responsibly ✤ Most reputable CMSs help with this, specifically in blog or news sections with archives that may look like duplicate content ✤ Where you must duplicate content, utilize canonical URLs
  6. “On the Page” SEO - Architecture ✤ Mobile friendly or

    responsive view ✤ Smartphones & tablets combined account for 60% of all online traffic ✤ Smartphones & tablets combined account for 33% of organic search traffic ✤ CONCLUSION: Many websites are not configured to efficiently convert mobile visitors
  7. “On the Page” SEO - Architecture ✤ Site load time

    ✤ Use solid hosting ✤ Avoid large, high quality images ✤ Measure at https://developers.google.com/speed/ pagespeed/insights/ ✤ Every 100ms increase in load time decreases sales by 1%. (Source: Amazon)
  8. “On the Page” SEO - Architecture ✤ Deliver secure version

    of your site to visitors ✤ Utilize an SSL certificate to deliver the https:// version of your site
  9. “On the Page” SEO - HTML ✤ The following should

    be appropriately descriptive and include natural usage of targeted key phrases ✤ HTML title tag ✤ meta description tag ✤ headlines and subheads (h1, h2, etc.) ✤ img (image) alt and title tags ✤ a (link) title tags
  10. “Off the Page” SEO ✤ Trustworthiness of your site and

    sites that link to you ✤ Links to your site ✤ Personal connection ✤ Social reputation and activity
  11. “Off the Page” SEO - Trust ✤ Many trustworthy sites

    linking to your site makes your site more trustworthy ✤ Many trusted sources sharing your site’s content makes your content more trustworthy ✤ A site that’s been around longer tends to be more trustworthy ✤ Google Authorship, or another way to verify the author, gives a site identity and is more trustworthy ✤ Pirated content will hurt your site’s trustworthiness
  12. “Off the Page” SEO - Links ✤ Trustworthy and numerous

    links from other sites to yours are very important ✤ Anchor text should be descriptive trustworthy commercial refrigeration repair vs. http://northeastcooling.com ✤ Check external link data here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
  13. “Off the Page” SEO - Links ✤ Don’t pay for

    incoming links ✤ Don’t spam other sites with your links
  14. “Off the Page” SEO - Personal ✤ A person’s location

    with respect to your site’s can influence where your site shows up in their search results ✤ Whether or not a person has visited or shared your site before influences where your site shows up in their search results ✤ Whether or not your friends have shared or favorited your site influences where it shows up in search results
  15. “Off the Page” SEO - Social ✤ Respected networks sharing

    your content help your reputation ✤ Number of shares on social networks helps your reputation
  16. SEO Tools & Resources ✤ Measuring SEO Results ✤ Google

    Analytics (FREE) ✤ Overall traffic, search traffic, key phrase quality, social traffic, site speed, visitor flow, e-commerce sales, etc. ✤ Google Webmaster Tools (FREE) ✤ Sitemap submission, crawl errors, query data ✤ moz.com ($99/mo for 5 campaigns) ✤ Crawl errors, keyword rankings, competitive data
  17. SEO Tools & Resources ✤ Ongoing Education ✤ Search Engine

    Land: http://searchengineland.com/ ✤ Moz.com blog: http://moz.com/blog ✤ Matt Cutts blog: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ ✤ Search Engine Journal: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/