adpapa Editor
29 May 2021
In this article, I will take you through ten of my best small business SEO tips, to help Australian business owners and marketers get better rankings on Google.
We all know how search engine optimisation (SEO) is always very important. Who doesn’t want their sites to be visited by more people? However, SEO is not a very simple task, it needs to be planned at the very start..
Tip 1: Choose the right keywords
The most important of my small business SEO tips is choosing the right keywords. Keywords are the most important SEO item for every website because that is how search engines view webpages – as clusters of keywords.
When determining your keywords make sure and take into account how many worldwide searches there are each day for the keyword as well as how many other websites are competing with you. This might sound difficult to comprehend at first, however if you use a keyword tool like the free WordTracker tool you can easily build a list of keywords.
Even without using a Keyword tool you can figure out that if you have a site about wine, “wine” is a mandatory keyword. However if you don’t include more keywords like “wine club”, “wine tasting”, or even “merlot” that also relate to your site, getting a high rank for “wine” is unlikely.
When determining your list make sure to NOT include keywords not related to your website just because there are a lot of searches for it. For example, don’t include “wine critics” if your website doesn’t have anything about it. Always remember to use keywords that describe the content of your site best and that are most likely to be used by users to find you.
Ideally, you know your users well and can estimate correctly what search strings they are likely to use to search for you.
Tip 2: Generate great content and repeat!
Search engines love great content. The more relevant content you provide them the more often they will visit your site and help your rankings. When deciding on what type of content is a good fit for your website, think back to your keywords. Keyword research can spark a content flood.
Use WordTracker or a similar tool to find variations of your top keywords and generate content about those topics. Once you’ve figured out what to write about, using WordPress or another content management system can make this process easy.
Just create a new blog post each day and you’ll see the search engine spiders start showing up and visitors keep coming back each day to see what’s new.
Tip 3: Add keywords to inbound anchor text
The text people use to link to you is one of the most important factors for how you will rank in Google. Anchor text is the visible text of a link. For example, if I was going to link to a friend’s blog, I might use his name for the anchor text. For example: Check out Sally Smith’s Blog on Inbound Marketing.
The primary reason anchor text is important is that Google determines relevancy and assigns a rank to websites and webpages. This is weighted mostly by the number of inbound links a website or web page has. Think of it as a vote from another website to yours. The more people that vote for you, the higher you rank – plain and simple.
Do a Google search for “computers” Skip the Wikipedia result and look at the Dell result. If you view Dell’s homepage you don’t see the word “computer” anywhere. When you view the source you can find the word “computer” just one time, in the meta tag for keywords. Obviously that doesn’t have the power to get it to that kind of ranking.
If you check the anchor text of their back links you’ll notice a lot of the anchor text uses the keywords “Dell Computers” or something with the keyword “computer” in it. Any link building efforts should start with keyword analysis, identifying the keywords you want to rank better for. The only reason this tip isn’t ranked at the top is to ensure you find your keywords before continuing on.
Tip 4: Improve your page response speed
A few years ago, Google put site speed into their ranking calculation algorithms. In 2021, this is now a very important factor, absolutely worth considering.
There are a number of things that can be put into consideration are caching, load balancing, network infrastructure optimisation.
Tip 5: Include keywords in your titles
Always give the pages better titles, it’s one of the important factor for search, from the query algorithm to user experience. For example, “Untitled” “New-Page-1” does not make sense. Even if it can be shown in the result, very few people will likely to click on it. Good page title would be something like the site intro page title for example: “Indoor Plants are Awesome – Here’s Why!” .
When you do a search in Google, the response page will include organic listings plus some paid listings. Of the organic listings the first line in bold is the title of that website page. If you were to click on the link you would also see the title of the web page in the outer frame of your browser.
You want to ensure your website titles are descriptive to browsers and at the same time include keywords about your products and services. To add or change the title tags within your website, open your web page in your HTML editor or notepad. Then look near the top of each web page within the [head] section and before the section in your HTML.
To add a title tag just start a new line and insert [title]Insert descriptive phrase including your keywords[/title]. To modify your title, just remove the existing title text and replace it with your new descriptive phrase that includes your keywords.
There are several benefits including enhancing the browsing experience of visitors with disabilities, increasing your page’s keyword density score and relevancy for your targeted keywords, and providing valuable information to all your visitors.
Validation for Placing Keywords in Titles
Do the same Google search again for “wine club” and notice that all 10 listings include the keywords “wine” and “club” in their title. Google pays particular attention to this when deciding relevancy and so should you!
Tip 6: Include keywords in your headings
When writing for the Internet, you should style your page the same way you were taught to write a report back in grade school. You have a primary heading (referred to as H1 in HTML) and a few secondary headings (referred to as H2 in HTML) and possibly several sub-headings (referred to as H3, H4, H5, etc.) which serve as the layout.
Search engines weigh headings more heavily than regular text of site copy. This is because they serve as an outline of what the site is about and are what you “the writer” are stressing to your viewers. When thinking of what to name each heading of your web page remember to include relevant keywords to the page content whenever possible. The best way to accomplish this is by adding keywords to your existing heading concept.
For example, if you have a website about “daycare” change the heading of “hours of operation” to “Daycare hours of operation.”
Word of Warning
Do not go overboard and place multiple H1 tags on a page or something similar that is unnatural to the way a page should be written. The technique of inflating your tags is considered keyword stuffing and will be penalised by Google and Yahoo!
Just remember to add some keywords to your existing heading copy wherever possible and you will get great search engine results without fear of repercussion.
Tip 7: Write guest posts and get them published
One of my personal favourite small business SEO tips and techniques is to write guest posts for other websites. You can write an article announcing your company, about hot topics like “renewable energy” and get syndicated.
By creating an appealing guest post, it can get picked up by much larger websites with better traffic and SEO metrics than yours. In addition to getting tons of one-way links to your website, you will also get lots of visitors that read your article, like what you have to say, and come to your site to see what else you have.
There are expensive ways to submit your guest posts and free ways. Since we love article submission so much. The more guest posts you submit, the more links you get, and the more visitors you get!
Tip 8: Give Google your sitemap
Search engine bots look for sitemaps when they visit your website. Providing a standard HTML site map will help improve the indexing of your webpages and allow bots to find webpages that they might otherwise have missed.
Since Google accounts for about 90% of all Internet searches in Australia, keeping them informed of your website and changes you make is a really good idea. It is also relatively easy to do. If you don’t already have one, go to Google.com and signup for a free account.
Once complete, login and go to your account. You will see a tab for webmaster tools. Go to the Sitemap section. Here is the easiest way to create your XML sitemap:
Great News for WordPress Users
If you are using WordPress, simply install the Google XML Sitemap Generator. This awesome plug-in notifies Ask.com, Google, MSN Live Search and Yahoo! about changes to your website via ping.
Tip 9: Always use accurate Meta Elements
Search Engines uses meta elements like , and to crawl the pages. is no longer used. This may be true, but I include it in this list of small business SEO tips because they still count for something with other engines. Within the three, has more influence on the ranking. You can customise these meta elements with any code editor.
Up-to-date Sitemap.xml and Robots.txt, and even a HTML sitemap page that provides all the links.
Sitemaps can be submitted to search engines, and they can also be picked up with the reference from Robots.txt.
Robots.txt can be used to point search engines to the sitemap files, and prevent some of the folders from being crawled.
Tip 10: Leave meaningful comments
Google and Bing caught on to link swapping a long time ago. So now instead of exchanging links or having a directory of links you need one-way links from relevant websites. A great way to accomplish this is to find forums and blogs from people in your industry and leave comments.
Be sure to include a link back to your website (and keywords in inbound anchor text). If your business is Perth indoor plants for example, you could sign up to Quora or other garden based communities and then start commenting on important things in your industry or niche.
You can also just leave a simple comment, however we definitely recommend leaving a strong valid comment that will get people to notice you and want to check out your site. This includes the search engines!
Tip 11: Treat each page unique
Another of my small business SEO tips that you can’t miss is this. The content on each of your webpages should be unique. So don’t use the same keywords and tags from your homepage to describe these pages too.
If you have a website about bikes, you might have a webpage about Mongoose or Giant bicycles. That page should me SEO’d for the keywords that best describe it. This will help you get deep links to your website which will help you have a higher ranking when people search for Mongoose or Giant bikes.
Tip 12: Use keywords in your domain name
When choosing your website domain name try and include your primary keywords whenever possible. In addition, when you name individual pages within your website try and include your top keywords related to that pages subject matter. Be careful to ensure your domain name is easy to spell and easy to remember.
For example, you could use the domain perthindoorplants.com.au because it includes several keywords variations that describe the site. In order to rank highly for all of these, I included all of them in my domain URL.
This process should also be used for individual pages within your website. If you write a page about picking the best keywords, you should name the page accordingly. An example would be http://yourdomain.com/picking-best-keywords.html
Validation for Placing Keywords in Domain
Do a Google search for “wine club” and notice that 9 out of the first 10 listings include the keywords “wine” and “club” in their domain name. Pretty convincing proof, which places this tip at the top of our list.
Summary: Sweet small business SEO tips
There we have it, that’s my dozen sweet Australian small business SEO tips. I hope you found them tasty, and at least one or two in the list above brought you some new knowledge.
Now, go get a better ranking! Good luck!
