When Written Content isn’t Enough

Any small business owner knows the importance of making a website that ranks well on major search engines. The hard part is knowing what will help us make our websites show up on the coveted first page of Google. You can apply all the SEO techniques that you know and still struggle to get a decent page rank. There are new and better ways to work on increasing website traffic and improving the search ability without just relying on words.

Slideshows

Give your small business home page a little pizzazz by adding a customized slideshow. It will add a “wow-factor” to your website. Slideshows are aesthetically appealing and it offers a little something special for your viewers. Basically, you’re just creating a PowerPoint presentation and putting it online. It can be a great way to summarize what people will find throughout your website, or perhaps just in a specific section of a webpage. You’re making your readers more interested in your website when you offer something that makes visitors get involved as they go through the content. Just remember, let the viewer choose when to access each slide; don’t have it on auto-run.

Video

When you have videos on your website, you’re encouraging visitors to stay longer. By engaging them with a multimedia experience, they’re likely to visit again. The videos do not necessarily need to be ones you created. You could put related content videos on a webpage or clips of relevant current events. As long as you’re not taking copyrighted material and making it seem like your own, you’ll be fine. You can also incorporate live chats on your website, if it seems fitting.

Footers

Linking your website’s pages together by text links with the keywords as the anchor text may give your website the lift it needs. Just make sure the wording in the links is the target SEO keyword/key phrase. Also, add your footer links to all of the web pages included in your website for the best results.

What You Shouldn’t Do

Search engines are getting smarter. A lot of time is wasted on trying to figure out which SEO techniques are worth their salt. There are a few things that people are still doing beyond written content for their small business website that isn’t really helping. These are things like:

Link Exchanging. There is no longer a need to do this, as reciprocal linking between websites does not improve content anymore.
Pay for Website Submission. You can do it yourself if you feel you need to, but websites like Google and Bing are so powerful, they’ll know your website is there in very little time. You can increase your chances of being found by simply posting the link to your website on someone’s Facebook page.
Drop Links. Don’t drop your link in blog comments, whether it be on your blog, or someone else’s. It’s an out-of-date practice that will not get you better rankings for your website. Do it enough and web crawlers will start to notice. This can be considered a form of link spamming and is also known as “Black Hat SEO.” You can get your website removed from search engines if you keep these practices up.

SEO is evolving, and your visitors expect to see a professional-looking small business design when they arrive at your website. It can be a chore to keep up with all of the new and improved SEO techniques to make your small business website stand out against competition.

Websites do take some time to create, and you should always make it a priority to keep yours up to date and running well. However, you might be really busy with other aspects of your business. Thankfully there are great web designers out there to help take some of the weight off your shoulders. Read this article to find out What to look for in a Web Designer.

Small Business Design Resources