If you want your local business website to rank well in your local area, you will want to read this article all the way through, to fully understand how SEO (search engine optimization) research and link building can get local business on the first page of Google, and how it can help your business.
Research: Before you do anything else it is important to find the best keywords for your local business; you are looking for the words that people would type into the search engine search bar in order to find your business.
This can be done by using the free keyword tool that Google provides for its AdWords customers use, so you will need to sign up for an AdWords account with Google.
When you have done this, put a seed word into where it tells you to put your keywords, so if you have a window company you would type in the word windows, and the keyword tool will return several suggestions, such as aluminium windows and doors, UPVC windows and doors, window sills, as well as many others.
Google will also give you an idea if the amount of searches made for each term and how much competition the term has, as well as the cost per click for an AdWords campaign.
With this information you can start to get an idea of the best words or phrases to use for your local business, you are looking for a word or phrase that has a lot of searches but not too much competition, if it has very little competition this could mean that people are not spending on that word, and are only looking for free information, this can be checked by seeing if your competitors are spending on an AdWords campaign, if they are then this word should be O.K. to use.
Once you are happy with your chosen keyword phrases then you can purchase a Domain name, based on the chosen phrase, and start to build your website using the words and phrases that you have found.
Many people spend a lot of money having a website made, by a company specialising in website design, you will need to make sure that the company knows what they are doing, as most of them do not know much, if anything at all about search engine optimization, so many websites do not appear in the search results, because the search engine spiders cannot understand what the website is about, you will need to find someone who understands on page optimization.
When you are happy with your website or blog, it is time to start the off page optimization process this is done by writing original and informative articles about your niche or profession, using some of your keywords in the title and content to promote it, but do use your keywords too often about 5% of the content would be about right.
Be very careful to not make your article sound like an advert for your company, as it will not be published by the article directories, you will be allowed to leave a link back to your website or blog, (in your resource box) and if you make your article interesting and informative, then your readers may visit your site, but in any case you will have a valuable link back to your site.
This is called link building, and it is one of the most important things that you will have to do, the reason for this is that the search engines count the number of these links, and looks at the quality of them, to help them decide where to place your site in the search results, the more good quality links that you have, the more important the search engines think your site is, and therefore the better position you will get.
There are many ways to build back links; you can leave a comment on a related blog or on a forum post for example, but article writing and submitting them to the best article directories is probably the best way to get good quality links back to your site, as article directories tend to have a good page rank.
There are too many ways of building a link back to your website to mention in this article, but I hope that you are at least beginning to get the idea of how this works, and hopefully you can now see that SEO research and building back links can get your local business on the first page of Google.
Please feel free to share this article with others that might find it useful.
To your success,
Wolfgang Bloomfield.
