Can Small Business Owners Manage SEO Themselves?


Search Engine Optimization (SEO) remains one of the most important and popular method of generating website traffic. Think about what everyday person does when he is looking to find information about a product or a business. He will head to Google or some other search engine, and search for it by typing the business or product name or some other relevant information. If your website does not show up in the first few pages of the results chances are the user will head to some other, or even worse, competitor’s website. So what is involved in managing the SEO?

What is SEO?

SEO is about optimizing your website and other related information such that it is highly visible to the users and potential customers. When you manage this properly you can improve the ranking of the website and get more traffic to it resulting in higher sales. Ever since the prominence of Google and other search engines in providing the gateway to websites with their search engines SEO has become more and more important for businesses of all types and sizes. Large corporations have dedicated teams to manage the SEO and websites. Some small business owners also try to do the same, however their limited resources does not allow them to do it to the extent required.

What is involved in Managing SEO?

There are number of actions you need to take to improve the SEO ranking of your website. Some of them are easy and quick, while others require extensive research and effort to be effective. To be effective at this it helps to understand how Google and other search engines rank the websites when providing search results to the users. Based on this you can tailor your efforts to ensure your website is ranked higher in their search algorithms. While understanding full extent of the algorithms is not quite easy there are few things you can do to get quick results. Some those things are:

  • Publish relevant content – If you website contains content that is relevant to the industry or topics you cover the chances of getting it ranked higher are much better. Search engines do not like hodgepodge of information scattered on the website.
  • Update it regularly – In addition to including relevant content it is important to update the content regularly. Updated product information and including blog are some of the ways to update the website content regularly.
  • Pay attention to Metadata – Metadata is are the tags that provide information to search engines what your website is about. If you do not provide correct metadata or don’t provide at all search engines will not be able to find out and they will not rank your website higher when uses are searching for information.
  • Have other websites link to yours – This is one of the most important SEO building techniques out there. The more websites link to yours the higher reputation it will have with the search engines. Make sure you produce worthy content that other websites would like to link to and proactively build those links.

As you can see managing SEO is not easy and quick. It takes lot of research and effort to keep at it on a regular basis. You can manage it yourself if you have resources or ask for external help from the companies such as thehoth.com dedicated to providing this type of service.