Calvert Creative

Most every business has a website, but many small businesses have sites run by people who are also handling sales, production, financials, or other items as well. If you aren’t an expert in search engine optimization — helping search engines find and index your site appropriately — there are still lots of things you can do to keep your site healthy and functional in the SEO universe.

1. Clarify Your Goals
Everything begins here. Get your goals and services in order, rank them in order of priority, and make sure your website page titles, content, imagery, and navigation reflect your goals.

2. Keyword and Page Title Match
It’s important if you are selling purple widgets to mention purple widgets in at least one of your page titles and your page content. Take the time to go through your site and match your page titles with good keyword-targeted content.

3. Reduce Clicks Between Visitors and The Content They Want
You want to help your potential clients find the content they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible. This means no gateway pages (the “click here to enter” or introduction pages), and clean, obvious navigation. This same rule goes for scrolling, too. Most people won’t scroll through endless content to get to the bottom of the page, so try to place your most important content toward the top of your site.

4. Utilize Deep Links
You don’t always want to send your web traffic to the home page of your site. If you have an adword campaign targeted toward picking up people looking for women’s shoes, link it to the women’s shoe section of your site. This is called deep linking, and it goes with rule number three above, reducing the number of clicks between your potential clients and the item or service they are looking for. If they want to see more content on your site, they can always use the “Home” navigation button, or click on other items that interest them.

5. Reduce Image File Sizes
Ever been to a website only to have to wait while the images loaded? Often this is because the file size was set up for print usage (where you want a big file with lots of data), then moved onto the website without being reduced for web. Visitors will simply go on to another site if they can’t get a quick load on web pages.

There are free image filesize reduction tools out there you can use if you don’t have Photoshop or another pro tool. Try Shrink Pic, Dropic (Mac), or GIFbot for starters. When your site loads quickly and visitors stay and find what they’re looking for, search engines add validity to your site.

6. Name Image Files with Keywords
If you’re selling phones, you probably have a picture or graphic of a phone on your site. This is a great opportunity to name those files with some of your targeted keywords. Instead of “Image2395″ use a keyword matched to your image and your content for the SEO win. You can also do this with PDF downloads and other items on your site as well.

7. Use Keyword-Rich Headlines
Keyword-rich headlines within your content are useful not only so that visitors can scan quickly and get a sense of the content, but also because they help search engines to understand what your content is about.