As web designers, we often come across a small business who has extremely good reviews online on several review sites such as Yelp and Kudzu, yet the business fails to take advatge of their positive reviews. Having positive reviews online are great and it says a lot about the credibility of a small business, but if a small business lacks a decent website a lot of that credibility is lost.

To take full advantage of positive reviews online it is absolutely imperative that a small business has a website. A positive review will attract interest to the business, leaving the potential customer wanting to find out more. A positive review does not close the deal, it only invokes interest. Once their is some interest created, the next step a consumer usually takes is to check out the business’ website to learn more about the services offered and whether the business is a right fit for the potential customer. When the user searches for a small business’ website only to find out that the business does not have one, a lot of the credibility and interest that the positive online review created is completely lost. When a small business doesn’t have a website it seems as if the small business doesn’t take their business seriously, and can really damage the business reputation. With over 80% over consumers researching businesses before the purchase, it is absolutely necessary for any small business to have a website.

At Simple Super Media Group we specialize in small business web design and can develop an online presence within any budget. If you own a small business don’t go another day without a website. Contact us today!

In this tutorial we will look at some tips and techniques you can use to arrange your pages to get higher search engine placement.

Most Important Tips for Higher Search Engine Placement

• Put your keywords in the “title” tag of your site. Make sure the keywords are in the beginning. Don’t make your title anymore than 7 words.
• Put keywords in your url’s. Name pages after their keywords.
• Make keyword density about 4-7% of the page. Anything higher than 10% looks suspicious to the search engines.
• Put your keywords in the H1 and H2 headings, but be sure the page has relevant content.

Somewhat Important Tips for Higher Search Engine Placement

• Have your keywords in the beginning of the document.
• Have your keywords in the “alt” tags for pictures to describe what the picture is to the search engines.
• Keyword proximity matters to the search engines. Having a phrase like “higher search engine placement” is not the same as having “higher” in one paragraph and “placement” in another paragraph.

Less Important Tips for Higher Search Engine Placement

• Adding keywords in meta tags is not even looked at by Google, although Yahoo! and Bing still consider them slightly.
• Optimizing for synonyms can be effective as most of the search engines can determine synonyms and include those words into the relevancy for your main keywords.

Bad Techniques for Higher Search Engine Placement

• Don’t dillute pages with keywords. Dilluting pages with keywords will take away form your main keywords and excessive keywords will reduce the relevancy of your pages.
• Don’t stuff the page with your keywords. Having a keyword-to-content ratio of more than 10% can hurt your page ranking because search engines will realize your trying to manipulate the search engine placement and they could possibly ban your from the results.

Follow these tips to increase your page relevancy and climb higher in the search engine rankings. We design sites that take search engine rankings into account from day one. If you would like a website designed make sure your designer has mastered SEO as well.