Small Business SEO Benefits

Posted by Marko | Filed under San Diego SEO

If you own a small business in today’s online world, you better be online and on top of the search engines or else you’re missing a boat load of potential customers.

For example, if you own a carpet cleaning company in San Diego then you are going up against something like this.  At first look, it seems pretty competitive.  There are 10 business listings and most of the first page results directly have the keywords “carpet cleaning san diego” in their title tags.  But lets look a little deeper…

Bobs Carpet Care

Why is this site ranked #1 in Google?  Because it employs multiple SEO techniques correctly.  Here are some of the biggest factors I see:

  • Back links - The site only has 280 back links but they are quality back links.
  • Title & Meta tags - The sites title and meta tags are keyword rich, well written and highly relevant.
  • On page SEO - The sites content is well written with good utilization of keywords.
  • Internal links - At the bottom of the page you will see they link to multiple pages of their site, this is good use of the homepage for max link benefits for inner pages.
  • External links - Unlike most website, this one links out to trusted websites like this one, this one and this one.
  • Clean URLs - Bobs utilizes clean URLs which also have keywords stuffed in them.
  • Sitemap - They have a sitemap for humans and search engines!
  • Good use of HTML/CSS for optimal code to content ratio, 13%.

Keyword Density Report

Overall, this is a very well SEO optimized website, and because of this, it ranks well.  Props to the SEO or SEO’s of Bobs Carpet Care.  Additionally, I’d like to add some things that would make this rank even better and for more keywords.

  • Breadcrumbs - When used correctly, bread crumbs can help you spread internal link juice to every single one of your pages.
  • Robots.txt - This is a minute detail, but adding a robots.txt file can help you block certain pages of your site and also will tell the spiders to crawl your site.  Its a good thing to have.
  • W3C Validation - Most people will brush this off but I personally think its important.  If you’re a developer you should be developing to these standards regardless of if you’re an SEO or not.  Having a site that validates means a spider can crawl it without getting caught up in your code.
  • Business listing - Bobs should be listed in the business listing in Google.  This does not take long to do and will give them two links on the first page!
  • Nav links - This site already utilizes a drop down nav with regular HTML text, which is great.  The next step would be to add a drop down for all their services with a keyword rich text link in the nav.  This would help spread the link juice internally from the top of the page, not bottom.
  • Text - Above the header image, I would add a list of services in small font text to ensure its the first thing the spiders see.  Text at the top of a page shows importance to spiders, so let them know what your services are right off the bat.

Adding the above suggestions would really set this site apart, but as you can see, you dont have to have a perfectly SEOed website to do well.

If you have a website you’d like me to review, drop me an email and let me know.

Tags: , ,

Permalink | November 1st, 2008

Leave a Reply