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Checklist for Small Business SEO
Search Engine Marketing Search Engine Optimization The Beginner's
Checklist for Small Business SEO| The Beginner's Checklist for Small Business SEO |
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| Wednesday, 12 May 2010 22:38 |
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by Danny Dover The Beginner's Checklist for Small
Business SEO
Research Before you do any SEO you need to research the part of the web you will be trying to change. Many people believe this is the most important step in the SEO process. No skipping!  Complete the
The Beginner's Checklist for Learning SEO
- Completing all the tasks on this list will give you all the
skills necessary to complete this checklist. Write down your
goal - Why are you doing this? Why do you want people to find
your client's site? Is simply viewing your client's site not
enough? My goal was “I want local parents to find my client's
website and be persuaded to register their children.” Brainstorm and
write down search queries - What words might people type into
the search engines to look for your client's company? For my
example, I came up with “Issaquah Preschool,”
“Issaquah Daycare,” “Sammamish Preschool,” (a
neighboring suburb) “Preschool Summer Camp,” and
“Creative Preschool.” Your list should be longer.Research your
chosen keywords - Sign up for Google Adwords and
learn how to use the provided “keyword tool” and “ad text ideas”
generator. Learn how to use Wordtracker (paid) and/or the Keyword
Difficulty tool (free).Using what you
learned from keyword research, record what you believe to be the
best keywords - For my project, I used “Issaquah Preschool,”
“Issaquah Early Childhood,” “Preschool Summer Camp,” and about five
others. Analyze the
current Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for your keywords
- Who is ranking? What are they doing effectively and
ineffectively? Investigate and get to know your competition.Create a list of
your competition - Use the information from the previous step
to create a list of competitors. You will use this to figure out
how other sites were able to get into your targeted SERPs.Use Yahoo Site
Explorer to find the sources of your competitor's
links - Record the sources of links your competitors have
and save them for later. Search for your
client's site - Use the site command on Google, Bing and Yahoo
to see if your client's site is indexed. Ex.
“site:www.gigglywigglypreschool.com.” If your client's site is not
indexed, you need to figure out what is preventing the search
engines from crawling it. Be sure to also search the title tags of
your client's most important pages to see where/if they rank.
Record your results.Onsite Sign up and
verify with Google Analytics, Google
Webmaster Tools, and Bing Webmaster Center - This is an
important step that will become necessary later. Let Google Analytics
run for two weeks before doing any SEO - This allows analytics
to collect data and provides you with a baseline. I recommend you
screen capture the relevant pages so you can show your client how
your work has positively affected their site.Evaluate the
visual design of your client's site - If the site drives
people away, no amount of SEO efforts will help. If the site looks
terrible, find well designed sites in your client's niche.Check compatibility
between browsers - Visit your client's site using Mozilla
Firefox 2.x and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Safari 3.x. Remember
to do this on both a Mac and a PC. You want to make sure your
client's website renders correctly and won't drive away
users.Create a new
e-mail address specific to the site you are working on - Use
this address for all e-mails pertaining to your project. This is
especially important for link building. Look at your HTML code
and optimize all of the SEO related tags - If you are unsure
what these are, reread the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Decide if you
need a meta description - Modern search engines are great at
scanning the text of websites and displacing applicable snippets
based on user queries. You need to decide if you want to rely on
the algorithm or create your own description. I suggest making your
own meta description for your homepage and letting the engines
figure out the rest. Remember the purpose of making your
description is to convince potential customers to click on your
link in the SERPs. Make it convincing and use your keywords.Add company
address and phone number - Be sure to do this on every page.
The search engines are smart enough to detect address and phone
number formats. This data is essential to local search. I recommend
adding the the following formatted data (example is for an American
company) to the footer of all of your client's pages:Company Name
1111 11th Pl NE City, State Zip (555) 555-5555 Add a
robots.txt - This is important for a couple reasons. First, it
allows you to specify exactly what pages major search engines can
crawl. Second, including a robots.txt makes tracking search engines
easier because they always download the file before navigating your
client's site. This characteristic differentiates the SEs from
normal human visitors.Offsite Add your
client's business and website to the major search engine's local
listings - This is paramount as local search is likely to
drive the majority of your traffic. These are the most important
places to submit:
Add your client's
website to industry specific directories - To find the
relevant directories, use the list of link sources you created
earlier. Also, you can try searching for “(your client's local city
name) business directory” and “(your client's industry) directory.”
For example, I would search “Issaquah business directory” and
“preschool directory.” Be sure to record which directories you add
your client's site to and the usernames and passwords you use. You
should use the e-mail address you created earlier for directory
registrations. You should also make sure to use different passwords
for different logins. You should always be thinking about
maintaining your client's security.Try to get the
links your competition already has gotten - Use the list of
link sources you generated from Yahoo Site Explorer and try to
acquire links from those sources. This may be as simple as
submitting a form or as cumbersome as e-mailing webmasters to find
out their link addition policies. Always try to get your keywords
in your link anchor text.Get more
links - Scour the internet and find other sites that might
want to link to your client's site (site:website.com "submit a
link"). Remember the importance of the source of your links and the
anchor text used. 100,000 links from spammy sites with bad anchor
text will help you less than a single link with excellent keyword
anchor text from a super authoritative site. A good place to start
is to use the Juicy Link Finder. You should also consider your local
chamber of commerce, local networking groups, and local
complimentary businesses. Search engines like to see local links
pointing at locally targeted websites.Decide if
utilizing social media sites is advantageous - Is your client
in an industry that could actively participate in social media? If
so, be sure not to be spammy and to only contribute quality and
appropriate content. It is much more expensive to fix a ruined
online reputation for a business than it is for a standard user.
You may also want to consider adding your client's business to
professional networks such as Linkedin.Create and submit
sitemaps - Create a sitemap. Then login into Google Webmaster
Central and Bing Search Webmaster Tools and submit it. Optimize your client's site from Google's side - Login
to Google Webmaster Tools and click on the tools menu. You will
want to set the correct geographical target and preferred
domain. In addition, you must also decide if you want to
enable image search. It may drive you traffic but the traffic will
unlikely be useful.Track and Improve Track progress - I
recommend taking a monthly screenshot of all of the following
SERPs. A screenshot is an easy way to gather a lot of information.
The image files contain data on when they were taken so they are
easy to organize. I recommend you do this for the following:
Create and
maintain a spreadsheet of your rankings - This gives you a
resource to prove to your client that your work is necessary. Be
sure to keep it updated monthly so that you are always aware of how
you rank.Continue to make changes, build links, and record your results - This step will never be completed. You should strive to become number one on all your SERPs and get so far ahead that none of your competitors will be able to compete. |
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