What SEO Means To Small Business Websites
What is SEO, by the way? It is short for Search Engine Optimization, a process that involves altering and providing relevant content on your website to make sure that it shows up on search engines. This can greatly help drive traffic to your website, especially if it is a homepage for your small business. It is especially good if your website will appear on the top ranks of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You may think that the websites you see that appear on the top list of search results pay handsomely to be there. But that is not actually the case. Most are simply using SEO to their advantage.
So how is this done and what should you do to make use of SEO? Getting your website the top spot on the results page of search engines does not happen overnight. You will need to dedicate a lot of time and effort on your website for this to happen. You need to give importance to three things: content, keywords, and links. Content is essentially what your website has – articles, polls, stories, pictures, etc. Basically, you need to make sure that your website’s content is unique but relevant to what your small business is about. Ascertain that you provide information on the services and products that your business offers to help the search engines sort and categorize your website properly and thus drive the right traffic to your website. You also need to make sure that your website has a lot of relevant content as this will ensure a generous amount of “hits”.
In connection to content, you also need to add some links to other websites that have similar content as yours. Links are as important as content, as having links to other similar websites will help search engines understand what your content is. Make sure there are a lot of links to other websites and try to get them to link to your website, too.
Finally, you need keywords. What are these? They are basically the words that people use when looking for certain things on search engines. You need to figure out what keywords most people would use to search for your specific business – depending on the industry, products, and services that you offer – and find a way to inject them into your website. The keywords must also be closely related and relevant the type and nature of business that you have.
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Joomla vs WordPress From A SEO Perspective
WordPress and Joomla are two of the top content management systems that developers go to when it comes to creating homepages, for both general and business purposes. But it can be quite daunting to choose which tool to use. In this regard, it is important to get to know these two web tools – become acquainted about their similarities and differences and somehow choose which one to use for your website depending on your capabilities as a developer. Here are some insights to help you out.
Similarities
Let’s start off with the similarities. Joomla and WordPress can be both be customized according to your needs with the use of plugins. And incidentally, plugins for both content management systems are also widely available throughout the internet. And when it comes to user base, both tools have a large community where you can gather all the tricks and tips being shared among users and developers. And more importantly, both WordPress and Joomla are free to use and most hosting providers offer both as options in their web tools options. But this is where the similarities between the web tools end. In the next section, we will discuss their differences.
When it comes to a SEO perspective, both sites offer ease of optimizing URLs. Joomla utilizes categories and sections to do content organization while WordPress makes use of Permalinks.
Differences
Joomla, to say the least, is a lot more complicated than WordPress. This is the web tool of choice if you want to create a community website. Joomla allows for a lot of choices when it comes to customization. You can set and edit navigation structures easily as it does not generally require html knowledge. But that is just the easy part. WordPress, on the other hand, is a blogger’s haven. This, in a nutshell, is a lot easier to use, although it can also be upgraded through plug-ins. It is also customizable in terms of navigation, widgets, apps, and content, but in a much simpler platform than Joomla. In fact, Google is even quite partial to WordPress, so this is a good vehicle when you intend to use it as a marketing tool. Although it is easier to navigate your way around the WordPress tools, most of its customization options are fixed, like the themes and color schemes, so there isn’t much freedom and control if you want to really change everything on your page.
In terms of setting up SEO components, Joomla require the user to login the FTP or Cpanel in order to be able to make changes to the htacccess file. Because of this, newbies might have problems makes changes on htaccess files since there are program classes that classify them as system files. Moreover, you might be required to make some changes on your file permission settings in order to make the intended changes. In WordPress, altering permalinks is quite easy, however, there are usually conflicting information that will get you confused as to what settings would be the best for SEO. Because of this, it is likely that you won’t be able to choose the best setting for SEO.
When it comes to SEO, WordPress would really require a SEO plugin while Joomla can definitely survive without one. It would be to your advantage to research about how to work around the limitations of using WordPress and Joomla so you would be able to maximize their SEO advantage.
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