Make These New Year’s SEO Resolutions Now

As the web has become more and more competitive for small businesses, SEO strategies have become critical. In a recent article posted on Multichannel Merchant, Stephan Spencer outlined 15 excellent New Year’s resolutions for better SEO results in 2013. Here are the highlights:

Use your customer’s vocabulary, not your company lingo

Sometimes this means going against the industry terminology that you think gives you a professional image, in favour of human words that are more commonly used.

Hijack traffic from common search terms

For example, consider a baby furniture retailer. When “baby” is typed into Google, the phrase “baby names” is suggested. The retailer could create a section of their website on baby names, drawing in visitors who are just doing research about expecting a baby, gaining the opportunity to show them products and promotions that they would likely be interested in.

This, of course, only works if the search term is related to your target market. All small businesses should not go ahead and create a baby names page.

Start blogging

Google loves fresh content, and hosting a blog is a very easy way to add new content to your website frequently. Start sharing some of your expertise with your target consumers today.

Diversify your anchor text

Search engines will penalize you for anything that looks unnatural or too perfect in terms of internal links. Instead of always using your exact keyword anchor text when linking to an internal page, use a variety of synonyms. For example, a lawn care company should not only use “weed control” as anchor text to their weed control page, but other variations such as “weed control services”, “dandelion treatments”, etc.

For the full 15 resolutions, visit MultiChannelMerchant.com.

If you’d like more advice to start your fiscal year off right, download our free Guide to Generating Better Leads Online today.