Search engine optimisation is the process of increasing the number of unpaid web traffic finding your site through the search engines. If you haven’t so far, you’ll soon discover that optimising your B2B site is essential in today’s business climate because some customers will only click on an organic search result so all the advertising money in the world won’t make them click on your ad, and organic traffic is free.
1. Use the page title and page description fields correctly
Each page should have unique metadata which is comprised from a page title and page description. To optimise your site for Google, limit the page title to 70 characters and page description to 150 characters. The information in the page title and page description should describe the B2B nature of the page. It’s important to pay attention to content duplication and avoid using the same page title or page description twice.
2. Smart link building
Building the number of links pointing to your B2B site naturally is an important factor which the search engines look at when determining your ranking. The emphasis shouldn’t be made on quantity, but rather on quality. In particular look at niche directories which are associated with B2B, blogs, forums and even try to get a link from your suppliers. To check who’s linking to your site or the progress of your link building, use one of the freebacklink checkers.
3. Optimise your B2B images for search
Optimising images across the site can help increase web traffic from Google image search and normal search. The key is to use a descriptive file name for the images and use the image alt text field. For example, the image bulk-pillow-cases.jpg has a much better chance to rank for ‘bulk pillow cases’ than pillow2397.jpg. In addition to driving up traffic from image search, naming the image correctly will help the page itself rank better in normal search as the engines are able to read the alt text field.
4. Fix 404 pages and fix them
404 pages and page could not be found will result in poorer user experience and if those pages had some back links pointing to them, you’re missing out. To find your 404 pages, you can use the free utility xenu which will test all your pages one after the other and report back its findings. Another option is to use Google Analytics. Most 404 pages have a page title such as ‘page not found’ so all you have to do in Google Analytics is head to ‘content’ then ‘content by title’ and type the page title. Click on the page title to view the problematic pages and fix them.
5. Add quality content
An important factor for ranking well is to constantly produce quality content. For B2B sites it can take the shape of product reviews, product recommendations and even how-to guides. If you’re struggling to find ideas for new B2B content, use wisdom of the crowds and search for ideas on Twitter trends or Google trends.
I hope my B2B seo tips will point you in the right direction.
