Small Business SEO

One of the biggest mistakes many people make, whether they are online marketers or businesses putting a site on the web, is they don't do their keyword research first. Once you have identified a prospective target audience, it is then time to focus on the keywords that will generate the best traffic for the site. This is where a software program known as Market Samurai can make all the hard work very easy.

Keyword research is essential in maximizing traffic. You need to know what terms people are searching for online when looking to buy some goods or services. There are many subtle differences too with keywords. Singular terms can produce more searches and therefore traffic, than the plural of a term for example. It can be a good idea to ask friends and associates what they would type into Google to get some base ideas. If you are in business, you are often too close to identify some of the obscure terms some people might use to find your product or service.

In business, life and most certainly small business seo, there is a old saying that holds quite true. That is, "if you can't measure it, don't do it!".

When it comes to small business seo, the web site changes you make today, the articles you submit to directories and the backlinks you obtain may take some time to filter through to your search engine results. It can take the search engines quite some time to pick up all these changes and then reflect them in your rankings.

Consequently, you need to be keeping a record of the changes you make and any other work you do to improve your rankings. You also need software that will keep a track of your rankings for the various keywords or phrases you are chasing in the search engines.

Over the years, I have used many different pieces of software for managing and monitoring SEO performance on client's sites. Without a doubt, the best of these is the newest kid on the block Market Samurai. Not only will it do your keyword research and provide search levels for particular words and phrases, but it will monitor your rankings for each of these areas which is invaluable in monitoring your SEO efforts.

You can get a free trial of Market Samurai and there are plenty of video training resources. Check out our full Market Samurai Review.

Many small businesses don't understand the relationship of their web site hosting in their overall SEO strategy. They will often sign up for the cheapest hosting available which can have the affect of reducing what could be a good site to the mediocre because of their hosting company's poor performance.

Google has made it quite clear in their Webmaster Help videos that one of the ranking factors they look for is site speed when ranking sites. Of course, this is but one of many factors, but small business SEO is a matter of building on all the small things to improve your rankings. Hosting is but one of these.

There are two major considerations when looking at whether your hosting service offers appropriate levels of performance.

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All the best,

Ric Raftis

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You can download your FREE Ebook, "110 Bite Sized Traffic Super Tips" by clicking the link.

The ebook is in PDF form, so you will need the Adobe PDF reader to access the content.

All the best,

Ric Raftis

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Many small business people, when considering an online presence, talk to someone who says they know about web design. Sometimes this is not even a web design business, but someone in their family who says they can write a website.

The problem is that there are websites and then there are websites, just like when comparing anything else. One of the biggest problems with websites is that to the uninitiated, they judge the website on what it looks like, when its effectiveness as an online marketing tool for your small business is measured by so much more than pretty looks. In fact, when it comes to websites, the look of the website is insignificant unless it performs in other areas such as functionality, ease of navigation, quality of backend code and application of effective SEO techniques.

A lot of small business websites are poorly written. Sorry, but that's a fact. It has been common in the past for people to throw a website online just to have an online presence. Many of these sites were written in a Microsoft program called Frontpage. Thankfully it is no longer sold today, but it's still around and people are still using it to write websites.

The problem with Frontpage is that it essentially wrote web pages for viewing in Internet Explorer. Whilst it is the dominant browser because it ships with Windows, its market share is declining. All web professionals use Firefox and Google's Chrome is making a sizable impact on the browser market. The problem with Frontpage websites, and many other sites built with visual software is that they don't display properly in all browsers. When professionals write websites, they test to make sure that the site is viewable in a range of browsers, not just Internet Explorer.

Indeed, that's a very good question, what is small business SEO all about?

So lets define it in a nutshell. Small business SEO is simply about optimizing your website for the search engines so that you rank as high as possible in the search engine results pages. When we talk about small business SEO, there are two factors, the on-page or on-site ones and the off-page or off-site ones.

SEO is not the mystery it once was. There used to be so many tricks involved, but these days the search engines have got the vast majority of them covered. That's not to say a new one won't come along tomorrow and be successful. But success is a funny thing, particularly when it comes to SEO. If the success is achieved through scamming the search engines, then you can rest assured that it will only work for a while until they build some new code into their algorithms to block the tactic. They usually then penalize the sites using that tactic if it's considered to be scamming, or "black hat" as it's known.

If you have a small business website, then you have probably received any number of emails offering SEO services promising to rank you at the top of Google. Normally, the email will go something like this or some similar variation.....

We would like to get your website on first page of Google.

All of our processes use the most ethical "white hat" Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalize.

Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal.