Small business need to adapt to the web, every business has a website but South African businesses see it as a should have but not that important. SEO for the small business website will change that to a must have very important attitude.
I have blogged about internet users in South Africa before, but I will say it again by 2014 there will be over 10 million internet users. Now remember Google looks for sites that provide a good user experience, to put on the first few search results pages, part of Googles criteria is age. (How long has Goolge known about your site). This is where SEO for Small business comes in, the SEO focus is on organic growth, well structured websites, quality content and quality back links. By doing your SEO now you will have a huge jump on your competitors, as Google will know everything about your site for a longer period than your competitors. This leaves everyone playing SEO catch up with you.
We tackle SEO for small businesses gradually, working on a fixed monthly fee over a few months which helps make the SEO affordable to the small business. The end result is to drive more traffic to your website, while featuring above your competitors in the search engine results.
Small businesses need to get away from getting a web site slapped together for the sake of saying you are on the web. Rather focus on a SEO site, correctly structured and designed.

Google is focused on our search experience, if you and I type a word into the search engine, the result needs to be exactly what we are looking for.  2 Things are at play here, firstly Google want’s you using their search engine otherwise their business is going to suffer.  Secondly we want real results immediately and not need to sort through tons of spam and rubbish.

So it stands to reason that the information displayed as a summary of a website must come from somewhere not so?

This info comes from the code of your website, very basic, something every web designer should know!  The last 10 sites I have worked with have not even had this in place.

Some things you need to pay attention to are:

Meta title and description that in the info displayed in this screen dump.  Use full URLs is your linking, make sure your keywords are in the title, description and content.  That is the bold words you see (I searched for South Africa).

So I say it again make sure your website is well designed and well structured.  When looking for an SEO consultant do your homework, unfortunately there are way to many con artists out there.

A lot of questions are coming through to us about SEO. The 2 questions that we are arsked the most has to be:

1. What is SEO and why do I need it?
2. How do you go about SEO

In this article I will attempt to answer both question for you.  So firstly what is SEO?  Well the short answer is Search Engine Optimization, which is quite a laborious and time intensive task .

The goal of SEO is to get your website onto the top pages of search engines.  For example your company sells candles.  Now when a potential customer googles the word candle or candles the ideal result for your business would be to have your company displayed on page one of the search results.  The next ideal part would be that the potential customer clicks on your link and visits your site hopefully buying your product.

The challenge comes in when the keywords that people use to search for your product  are also used by another million websites around the globe.  Your SEO efforts now become very difficult as you are potentially competing with a million other websites for the top spot.

The tasks required to getting your site to the top of the search results page is collectively referred to as SEO.  There is no magic tool for this, it takes time, research, marketing and is an ongoing process.  The trick is to do the necessary ground work in order to get your site to the top of the search results, then maintain the results by implementing a monthly SEO plan.

This brings me to the 2^nd question, How do we go about SEO?  As I said earlier there is no magic tool, your SEO efforts need to be planed and coordinated, below I will outline our 2 point approach to SEO:

SEO Analyze – Firstly we need to see how your website is structured, do we need to redesign, is the code SEO friendly.  What does your business do, what keywords would describe your business and how competitive are those keywords .  We also analyze the current traffic, where does it come from,  how long are visitors on your site.  The end result would be a report outlining the current state and highlight areas that need to be improved.

SEO Plan – from the analysis report we build a plan, this will be broken up into two phases.  Firstly what needs to be done immediately, this phase could take a few hours or a few weeks and is dependent on a number of factors.  (complexity, current website design,  current back links, social media participation, to name a few).   The second part is to put a monthly plan in place where the focus is on organic growth, this means that we ensure that the world wide web learns more about you at a pas that humans work at.