SEO for small businesses - 3 easy steps to optimize your site

Search engine optimization is really important to the success or failure of your small business marketing campaigns. In order to see the most profit from your online marketing, your site has to be visited by your target audience. The more, the better. That's where SEO (search engine optimization) comes into play.

So what is SEO?

Search engine optimization is the process of making your website as visible as possible so that your target customers can find your business. More visitors means more leads. More leads means more customers. More customers means more money. Simple math!

The fact is, SEO is a fairly complicated topic. Here are a few simple steps that you can incorporate into your website so that you can get as many visitors as possible.

1. Research:

The first step to any SEO campaign is to do effective keyword research. This can be effectively accomplished by going to google's keyword tool. You can type in generic keywords around your business to find out what people are searching. This will help you to make sure you are competing for keywords that people are actually searching. It's great to be on page 1 of google, but if you're on the first page for a term that nobody searches, it's pointless.

Look for long tail keywords (keywords that use several words) and chances are the local keywords are going to be your best bet. For example, if you own a floor cleaning business in the phoenix arizona area...you would want to start with the obvious:

You can see from the keyword tool that carpet cleaning phoenix is the obvious keyword phrase (long tail) to compete for because it gets roughly 6,600 searches per month.

2. Utilize: (meta tags)

Once you've identified a keyword that you want to compete for, you want to optimize your page for that word.  Most search engines don't place as much weight on meta-tags as they used to, but if you do them the right way it can make a big different.

You'll want to choose a few keywords (4-6) per page and place those in your meta tags.  The meta-tags go into the heading of your XHTML code.  When done correctly it should look like this:

<title>Professional Accounting Solutions</title>
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="Accounting, Accounting Solutions, Accounting System, Accounts Receivable" />
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="If you need a complete accounting system for your business, we have several options for you" />
<META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="Phoenix, AZ" />

These meta-tags tell the search engines that your site should come up if someone types in:

• Accounting
• Accounting Solutions
• Account System
• Accounts Receivable

Now, this is just part 1. Part two is that you have to use those keywords in your content.  In your words, you should include these words...specifically you should use the keywords in header (<h1>Accounting</h1>) tags, you can bold your keywords, underline your keywords and highlight them in your text in some way.  The final step is to run your page through a keyword checker.  Ideally, you want your keywords to be at a density of 2-5%.  A great tool that I use to find this out is at http://www.submitexpress.com/.  Use their meta-tag analyzer and it will tell you what the density is of your keywords and it will tell you if your meta-tags are relevant to your page.  This is a great tool for beginners.

3. Backlinks:

Once your page is optimized for the target keywords that you're trying to get ranked on, the next step is to build back-links to your page.  There are several strategies that will allow you to build backlinks quickly.  First, you should build social media pages for your site.  Facebook, myspace, twitter, Youtube.  These are all great options where you can share your page, build backlinks and get free traffic. Another great way to get backlinks is to blog/write articles.  You can create your own blog about your industry, write about your oppinions and input links back to your website.  If you use your keywords as the anchor text of the backlinks that makes the backlinks more relevent.  Another great option is to use social bookmarking.  This is easily accomplished by using sites like mixx, digg, stumbleupon etc.  This is a quick way to build back links and get more visitors to your site.

Ultimately, these strategies take work, but if you consistently do a little bit every day, over time it will make a big difference in your marketing efforts.

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