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.
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