For many small businesses, these hard economic times have been a make it or break it time. The price of everything is going up. This includes advertising. It’s getting harder and harder to find affordable advertising that actually has a decent ROI. Fortunately many small business owners already have a resource at hand that will help them do just that. It just needs some help. That would be your Website.

While many small businesses have Websites, very few are optimized so that local customers can find them. If the truth were known, most small business owners are too busy running their businesses to learn how to optimize their site. What’s worse, they may have paid good money to a so called SEO expert and be thinking their website is alread optimized when it isn’t. If you find that this is the case for you, here are some tips to optimize your website so it will rank higher in the search engines. I asked a Guaranteed Houston SEO consultant how he managed to rank so many sites in Google’s top 10. It’s simple he said. Then he gave me the following tips.

Start by removing any music or flash components you might have on your website. These components are not necessary for an optimized website. In fact, Flash and Javascript can actually hurt your SEO efforts. User study after user study have found that these two components turn off web users. Flash and Javascript add no SEO benefit to your website so why would you use it? Are you trying to entertain your visitors or do you want them to buy goods and services from you.

Next, make sure your main title reflects what your business is about. By failing to put your keywords in the Title, you failing to take advantage of a very important rule of SEO. If all your customers are local and you live in Seattle, your Title might say something like, Bob’s Widgets – Seattle’s Best Widgets.

If at all possible, there should be a page on your website for each product, or group of similar products, or services your company offers. Following the example I gave you above, your widget store might have pages that look like this; Bob’s Widget Outlet, Bob’s Groovy Widgets, Bob’s Round Widgets, etc.

Now make sure that each of those unique pages has your keywords on the page. I can’t tell you how many times I see small business owners fail to do this. Normally using the keyword 2 to 3 times on the page is sufficient. Whatever you do, don’t go overboard with this step. It will make your page look spammy. Stuffing keywords into a page is a no-no and can get you into hot water with both your visitors and the search engines. The last thing you want is to have to hire a [guaranteed Houston seo] company to clean up your online reputation after you ruined it!

Next, it’s all about the links. Incoming links to your site is what will get you ranked high. Use anchor text links when you start building links back to your site. A lot of small business owners will just use the words ‘Click Here’ when they make a link back to their site. This is okay, but a better way is to use the keyword that you used in your Title as the hypertext link. Any link pointing to your pages should have the keywords as the anchor text of the link. Make sure you change up the anchor text also. Having all the same anchor text links pointing to your site will get you penalized by Google. It’s known as Googlebombing.

Follow this advice and you should see your website start moving up in the search engines in a short amount of time. If you’re unsure about how to go about it, then search for a SEO Specialist that does know how. Just be sure you get one that will not take your money and run!

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