Of course, there are many ways to promote your business website, both online and off line. You can always promote using various methods, ranging from the typical methods to creative methods: Your website URL in bumper stickers, build a Facebook fan page, getting reviewed by bloggers, launch a contest, blog posting, etc. – but probably the most typical, yet the most effective website promotional methods are search engine optimization (SEO) and link building.
All methods are focusing on this particular goal: Bringing in traffic to your website. No traffic, no business.
There are many ways to drive traffic to your website – however the best quality of traffic is coming from the search engine (called organic traffic.) Sure, social media can bring you targeted traffic, but search engines can bring you targeted traffic that will actually buy from (or sign up with) you.
Let’s take a deeper look at search engine optimization… don’t worry, my explanation would be non-techie-friendly :)
Small business website search engine visibility: First page or die
Getting your website found in the first page of search engine result pages (SERP) when someone types a term into, say, Google search box, is the reason why people do SEO and link building. Why?
A study on SERP reveals that more than 95 percent of incoming organic search traffic to the surveyed sites are originating from the first page of SERP (the page you see right after you type in a search term.) All 3 major search engines – Google, Yahoo! and Bing – show similar percentage.
That being said, you need to seriously consider getting your website ranked on the first page of SERP for the terms/keywords relevant to your business website. Some SEO tools can help you do that – read on…
Why you need SEO tools
There are so many SEO tools available on the web today, but I do have my favourite set of SEO tools to help my business websites ranked better on search engines: SEOMoz SEO Tools.
To me, SEOMoz is the authority in SEO software – no doubt. As a non SEO specialist myself, I gain a lot of insights from the tools, forums and articles. Their SEO learning resources are also fantastic.
SEOMoz also develop some powerful metrics to measure a site’s strength and potential:
- MozRank – it measures link popularity; some experts consider it to be more accurate than Google PageRank.
- MozTrust – similar to MozRank, but it measures link trust (how trustful the sites linking to your website – link from universities and government sites are typically having strong trust properties.)
- Domain Authority – measures how well a website will perform in search engine rankings.
- Page Authority – similar to Domain Authority, but it measures the likelihood of a page to rank well on search engine.
SEOMoz has developed a tool to measure all those metrics: Open Site Explorer.
I strongly recommend you to use the SEO tools to measure how your business website performs on search engines, as well as “spying” on your competitors’ progress not only on search engines, but also on social media (you can compare your business sites’ results with others.)
Here’s an interesting update you might want to know: SEOMoz is now launching a 30-day free trial for you to try SEOMoz Pro, offering you full-access to all SEOMoz SEO tools, as well as getting actionable recommendations and the ability to monitor your SEO campaigns.
Sign up for SEOMoz 30-day free trial
Ivan Widjaya
SEO for small business
Image: svilen001