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Jul 31st
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SEO Tips for the Small Business Owner

SEO Tips for the Small Business Owner

Many small business owners today are asking why they should be advertising online, but in reality they should be asking why not. Unless you advertise in Times Square or some other luxurious location no one pays attention to billboards, bus station benches, or flyers hanging on the wall at the supermarket anymore. Phone books are outdated and most people use them to prop the door open, not to look for a number. You would be surprised how many people now turn to the internet to read their morning paper or catch up with the news.

The point here is not that real world advertising has no place in your marketing strategy. You should advertise through very selective means in your local area, but if you are not doing some major online advertising as well then you are handing over a large share of your market to your competitors.

Take a moment right now and look your biggest competitor from your local area up online. Chances are high that you will find them rather quickly. That is because they are using SEO to market their online presence. That online presence is in return feeding them a larger customer base. Are you ready to become more competitive, or will you just let them have that edge over you?

If you didn't find your competitor online...are you ready to be the first to strike?
When you are ready to start advertising online, the very first step is to learn about SEO. You will use SEO to optimize your website as well as for offsite advertising. Literally every aspect of online marketing circles around SEO and your keyword list.

Let's consider some beginner's tips for learning about SEO:
1. Your keywords must be directly related to your services or products. If you are an automotive repair shop in Cleveland, Ohio, you cannot advertise with keywords like "best weight loss plan." Your keywords will lead people who have some interest in those words to your website, and they better find information related to the keywords and nothing else.
You can use a wide variety of words related to your business. So, for our example auto repair shop in Cleveland keywords could range from types of services offered like "radiator flush" to location words like "Cleveland auto repair."

2. Keyword research is your best friend.
It does take some time to appropriately research the keywords that are being used by people in search of your products or services. This is time some small business owners want to skip through so they can get their advertising plan in action, but since every aspect of SEO centers on those keywords you have to make careful selections. There is nothing more important in SEO than having the right keywords! Skip the research here and you could blow your entire campaign right from the start.

3. Mix it up between long and short term SEO investments.
There are many different ways to use SEO to advertise online, whether you are a localized small business or one looking to expand around the country or the world. You want to aim for a mix of pay per click (PPC) opportunities which bring instant gratification and organic SEO and article marketing which bring in more long term results. You will rely more heavily upon one or the other depending on your business and the market you are competing in.
 

 

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization

In the competitive world of today, internet is flooded with millions of new websites every day. When you search for a certain keyword in any search engine, you will receive huge number of results which keeps on changing on a regular basis. If you want your Website to be displayed in search engine results for a keyword, there comes the need for Search Engine optimization (SEO). SEO is basically the process of optimizing a website to rank higher in the results of search engines. Search engines rank a Website based on various criteria like relevance of its content, age of the Website, popularity and trust. For your Website to rank higher in such a tough competition it is necessary to have all the qualities which search engines look for.

SEO refers to the techniques that are used to fine tune a website in such a way that the Website rank good in search engine results. The first and major step in this process is to increase the relevance of your content and make it keyword rich along with increasing the relevance of the design of the Website. SEO practices used are to make sure that you are taking all the required steps to improve the overall effect of the Website by talking care of Website’s content, design, look, popularity, usage , relevance and last but not the least the traffic of the Website.

There are several points you should take care of while performing SEO on the Websites. Some of the important points are listed as given below:

1. Optimize the Website:
First of all, you need to start by optimizing the pages of your Website. It includes making sure that your page have the correct tags, right keywords and relevant content. You should always include the main keyword in the META title. It is always a good idea to enter some details for Meta keywords and Meta description. A maximum of 3 keywords should be present per page. If your Web page contains more than one keyword or key phrase, you can separate them by using the Alt tags.

2. Include H1 Tags in your page:
Once you have included the Meta title and keywords, your next step is to make it easier for search engine crawlers to read the keywords present in your page as well as title. This can be done by including <h1> tag. To do this, you need to open the source code and include<h1> tags around title of the page which is present in the content.

3. Use of Site Maps:
Creating a sitemap for you Website will make the job of search engines a lot easier and they can easily read the content on your site, thus helping your Website to rank better. Creating a site map is very easy and there are many free tutorials available explaining the ways to do that.

4. Create robots.txt file:
After you are done with Meta tags, keywords, h1 and site maps, the next thing you need to do is to create a robots.txt file for the site. It is like giving instructions to search engine spiders about how to index you website content. It is used by search engine like Google to index the content. It makes the task of search engine easier and helps you having an edge over the sites without a robots.txt page.

5. Link Building:
The final and a very important step in optimizing your Website for SEO , link building. Link building helps you increase your rankings in search engines as well as your overall page rank (PR). When linking to various sites, you should request that the link should use you targeted keywords as anchor text. Google page rank is a very important part of link building as page rank has been invented by Google. Some ways of getting backlinks are article submission, directory submission, forums, comments on blog and social networking sites.


If all the above mentioned practices are followed with proper expertise, the websites will begin ranking high in search engines. You can keep a track on your Website status by using tools like Google analytics. However, you should remember that there is no shortcut to success in SEO. You should not fall trap in illegal SEO practices like black hat. Such practices show immediate results but can prove really disastrous for your Website image in long term. The best way is to follow all the given techniques and wait for your hard work to be fruitful