3 Onsite Optimization Tips that Impact Your Local Online Marketing 10 Fold

Every small business needs to advertise in order to grow their company more quickly. The most common road to travel down is local online marketing since it can draw in targeted consumers who are in purchasing mode. Many times, the first step for a small business owner is to build a website. However, one of the most overlooked issues in local SEO is having a website with a lack of optimization. Often times a business owner is in such a rush to get their website up and running that they will overlook important aspects of their web presence.

Yes, you can build a website in a minute with a website builder app produced by one of the countless companies providing that feature however; you are receiving a poorly coded website. How many times do you see one of those websites on the first page of Google? The better route is to use a WordPress website or some other type of template website. With these types of pages you will have better control over your coding which will reflect across your entire local online marketing campaign. If every effort you make during your local online marketing utilizes the same resource, your website, it should be as optimized as much as possible. After all you only have to change one piece of your web presence to benefit the entire process.

The 3 Most Commonly Overlooked Onsite Optimization Tips

• W3C Markup Validation – By utilizing the W3C validator you can be sure that your website is following web standards for best practices in HTML coding. This is what separates you from every other website out there since most contain many errors and warnings. Run your competition’s websites through the validator and see for yourself. Imagine having one piece of the puzzle they do not have yet, this is a huge advantage.
• Microformats and hCards – Microformats can be used to tell the search engine which data is used for what. By utilizing an hCard which is a form of microformatting you can quickly tell the search engines which part of your website is your address, telephone number and other important data. Local SEO relies heavily on this information since a searcher with local needs often uses a phone number or an address to contact and locate business they find online.
• Outbound Links – A major part of onsite optimization even for local online marketing is harnessing your websites juices and distributing them properly. Many businesses small and large like to link to their affiliates, partners and companies they do business with however, they allow the link to pass juice to those websites. Think of your website as a boat and every link, outbound and internal, are a hole in your vessel. By adding “no follow” tags to your links you can reduce the impact on your SEO from outbound links. Also, by opening outbound links in a new window you do not send traffic away from your website without an easy way of getting back.

Although there are many ways of improving your web presence through onsite optimization, these are some of the biggest issues seen online. Also, these onsite optimization tips can greatly improve a company’s local online marketing efforts. By having a more search engine friendly website, you have the upper hand on other local businesses who advertise on the internet.

These are great tips for a small business owner who can edit their website’s coding. However, if your website is not able to be changed easily the best approach is to look into a new one. It is a crucial player in the web presence game which interacts at all levels of the process, from drawing in a prospect to converting that prospect into a customer.