Search Engine Optimization The Myths Answered for SMEs

Marketing has always been one of the constantly growing challenges for Small and Medium Enterprises. Every business, however small it may be needs to reach out to its potential customers. To attract prospects, marketing with the right message for the right audience is crucial. For emerging SMEs budgeting for marketing activities plays a crucial role. Achieving business objectives while effectively utilizing every marketing dollar is the aim always.

Let your message reach out to the relevant target audience: SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is one of the most effective methods of driving traffic towards a website.Using SEO, you can position your website in a manner on the WWW, which will help your content to appear in search results on search engines, while the relevant people are searching for it online.

While going online many SMEs encounter the challenge of choosing the right help in terms of understanding how SEO is done. Each expert has their own views and recommendations for the same, which further on ads to the growing confusion.

Team IndiaMART Knowledge Services looked at some of the most common myths which the SMEs have which will help them make a sound decision:

Source: http://www.sme-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/SEO1.jpg

• I need to re-do my website

Many small businesses believe that they will need a separate page on their website that is dedicated to SEO. This is invalid and not the right approach towards an effective search engine listing. For SEO to have maximum impact you will need to incorporate it cleverly into every aspect of your website design. From the design to the content, every constituent of your website adds onto an effective SEO and must be looked into.

• Flash content is not search engine friendly

There are many theories revolving around the topic of flash based content. There is no issue at all in using flash based content on your website. Though we will always suggest that you keep your important content (content which people will really want to read on your website and will get attracted with) out of the bounds of flash. One of the critical drawbacks of flash is its accessibility on mobile devices. Mobile devices may not support flash based content at times, hence rendering your website unfriendly on mobile.

• Image hyper-linking will fetch me more SEO results

There is no actual difference between text and image hyper-links when it comes to SEO. Search Engines have been able to index image links as well as they do for normal text based hyper-links. Though a special consideration needs to be taken into account for image based hyper-links. You need to ensure that you use the same terms that you would use in anchor text links in the image alt attribute text (alt tags).

• The entire website design needs to change to make it SEO friendly

In some cases where the site does need to go in for a revamp, nothing better, otherwise for SEO there is no need to revamp your entire website. All you need to do is, look at the content of each page again and optimize the pages with 2-5 different keywords. These keywords will keep evolving and hence you will need to ensure that according to your customer's online search trends you update the keywords across your entire website.

• The more the pages, the better my rankings

This is one of the earliest myths. Yes it always helps having the right landing pages with just the relevant information available which helps the customer make an informed choice and hence may be a decision, but this is not always a mandatory requirement.

• More the keywords better the rankings

Spamming on keywords may ban you from search engine listings. 2-5 keywords per page are a good number. You should just keep changing them as per your understanding of the proposition being displayed on the page and the target audience. You can get a hang of what sort of traffic is coming to you by using Google Analytics.

We suggest that you keep these pointers in mind while investing into SEO for your website. These are common questions asked and mistakes done which ensure no results even after a lot of hard work.

Team IndiaMART Knowledge Services is committed to create new opportunities supported with powerful information for Small and Medium Enterprises. To know more or contact our experts, drop in a comment to this post and we will be happy to get in touch.