TKG SEO Blog

Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond
Google’s Webmaster Central Blog published a video done by Matt Cutts. Matt works for Google’s Spam Team and has had a lot of interaction with SEO’s. He gives some advice for small sites and their webmasters on how to compete with the big players in their industries.

His first suggestion for webmasters is to be creative. By being creative he means to target a particular niche or longer tail keyword phrase. It doesn’t make sense for a small site to that sells widgets to go after the term widgets. The site should be creative and go after a small niche within the widget industry. They could start targeting blue round widgets and have a lot of success with it. In targeting these niches, Matt’s advice is to become the authority. Google and users trust sites that show they know what they are talking about.

A final note Matt talks about is to leverage your speed. Big sites can take a long time to get things approved and implemented. Smaller sites are able to test out new things and make the changes quicker than the big players.

Small businesses have a great opportunity online. SEO is a must and can greatly improve a site’s visability and exposure. A lot of people over look the opportunities that the longer tail keywords have. When a user does a query for a term like “ipod”, they could simply be in the research stage of the buy cycle. If a site understands that, they could target a phrase like “black 30 gig ipod” that would signal this searcher could be looking to purchase since they are looking for a particular color and memory size. Small business should use SEO to their benefit and leverage their size and speed against their bigger competitors.