Search Engine Marketing

70% of small businesses do not optimise their website to improve search engine rankings

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Recent research by Thompson Local shows that 70% of small businesses do not optimise their website to improve their rankings in the search engines. Many businesses are missing out on huge opportunity because according to Forrester Research, as much as 70% of online purchases start with a search engine query.

As a result, many small businesses are missing out on the potential for new business from the Internet. However many large SEO companies offer SEO packages costing tens of thousands of pounds, but we have found that with a bit of research it is relatively easy for small businesses to do their own search engine optimisation. Many sites offer good SEO advice for small businesses who do search engine optimisation.

Our experience with Parallel Project Training

We launched www.parallelprojecttraining.com in January 2010 and have worked very hard to develop high quality back links. Today twelve month later we are number 2 in Google for our key words “Project Management Training”. What have we learned

1) Set up a site blog and develop relationships with bloggers in your subject area. They will be more than willing to swap blog roll links. One blog can generate many thousands of back links.

2) Keep the home page fast with less than 100 links and fresh with new content. We feed summaries of our blog posts onto our home page. This way we have fresh content every week.

3) Copy strong competitor backlinks using tools like www.majesticseo.com to identify the important links including Yahoo and other major paid directories.

4) Follow Twitter for you interested hash tags and post on blog posts as they become live. You will build many relevant back links.

5) Write articles and public on the main article sites. www.articlesbase.com has been the best for us.

6) Register on Google places.

We also employed a freelance SEO consultant in India to build some low cost bulk back links. We tried him out on a few mico sites first and we pay him a bonus for first page rankings. Be careful here many just post spam links.

Finally it took a year for the links and the domain to age. After twelve month our site too a huge leap from page 2 to page 1 for most of our keywords.

Image Credit: Fighter Boy

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12 comments

online advertising February 20, 2011 - 12:34 am
I have been in to SEO for years still each day their is some thing new to learn and some thing which has to be done to reach the top spot. Nice Article.
nigerian news February 27, 2011 - 11:35 pm
Optimizing your pages with each post takes time and a great discipline and extra time but the result will stand out at last.
Alex@Jocuri February 20, 2011 - 1:41 pm
Hello Paul, I agree with the fact that many companies small and big lose a lot of potential customers because they don't optimize their website for search engines and don't try to increase the visibility of their business by promoting their website to the first pages of search engines. But, I noticed an interesting factor, the big companies have started to decrease the demand for SEO specialists and focus on Social Media Marketing advisers that can boost their brand on social media website like twitter and facebook. So, I would say that nowadays SEO and social media is definitely something that all business that can benefit from having their business on the internet should try. And from the looks of it, it can be very simple if they know where to look!
Paul Naybour February 20, 2011 - 2:05 pm
Hi Thanks for the comments, nice to see some interesting in our experience. I agree that we can always keep learning from our SEO experiments. Some work and some don't I always thing that if you are adding value with post like this then you should be ok. Some of or competitors either do nothing or just buy back-links from spam sites. Social Media is very important we participate very full in t group on Twitter called #PMOT. All out blog post are linked to Twitter and we get loads of RTs from the community.
iphone 5 February 21, 2011 - 2:01 am
those small businesses need a website mainly for the reference purpose.. not to earn money or something... and they either lack in knowledge about seo or they can't afford to have one...
Kumar February 21, 2011 - 10:41 pm
Hi Paul, You are right. Site must be optimize for better ranking in search engine. When I started, I was doing only off page work and never on page. I thought only link is necessary but could not get any benefit. After some time, reading about site optimize factor, I did it with my blog. now, my site is ranking for some keyword that was not before.....
Make Money Online February 22, 2011 - 3:44 pm
Thanks for the tips, didn't know about majesticseo. Thinking of maybe signing up with them to get some well worth information. I'm also working on creating a relationship with other readers, but I think that I have to get some more content and maybe some PR before people wants to start enchanging blogroll links. =) //Alexander.
Paul Naybour February 23, 2011 - 3:35 am
Yes Majestic SEO is a truly awesome tool. You can track your back links building against competitors and also find the site which are contributing the most to you competitors rankings. The free version is good but I have just paid for the membership and the reports are first grade. I certainly helped me get my project management courses on to the first page of Google at Yes Majestic SEO is a truly awesome tool. You can track your back links building against competitors and also find the site which are contributing the most to you competitors rankings. The free version is good but I have just paid for the membership and the reports are first grade. I certainly helped me get my http://www.parallelprojecttraining.com/
p90x March 2, 2011 - 4:04 pm
I had no idea the percentage was so large of the number of small business that do not properly optimize their websites. After all their website is most commonly the face of their business so I would think this would be a high priority. - Robert
Parallel Project Course March 2, 2011 - 5:42 pm
Hi This is the source for the original research http://www.analyticsseo.com/blog/press-release-half-small-business-websites-are-not-search-engine-optimised most real businesses do very little SEO
Jesica Wills March 10, 2011 - 4:10 am
Majesticseo is new for me.
Davida March 22, 2011 - 12:50 pm
True, A lot of the websites owned by small business owners serve only as a glorified business card and end up as an expense to the business rather than an asset. Having are carefully planned and developed website that has great content to attract vistitors and keep their attention, generate traffic, presell their business, and convert visitors into repeat customers, is a great asset for any small business.
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