The Internet offers the small business the opportunity to present itself to the world, with the use of the right tools. One of those tools, search engine optimisation, is absolutely essential to customer visibility and acquisition. The small business market is full of examples of the success of businesses who took their small Business SEO seriously, so much so that the Fortune 100 is now spending around 40% of their marketing budgets for online SEO, and they are expected to vector at least a quarter of this into the mobile marketing sector for SEO by the year 2012.
Below are some tips for small Business SEO.
Pick your keywords wisely.
Assuming that you do not have the corporate budget to compete in broad keyword categories, the trick to successful search engine optimisation is the long tail localised keyword.
Long tail keywords are more specific in nature and resemble what a potential buyer would type in to a search engine query were he or she looking for the product or service that you offer. Search engines have also made an effort to improve the local bearings of the queries of their users, so competing for keywords which contain your city and state are also a great investment now.
The search engines themselves have free tools which will allow you to see the statistics for keywords that you are researching. All of this analysis and the tools are completely free to use.
Use meta tags.
Meta tags are the short headings that the search engine algorithm looks for to tell itself what the web site is about, so that it can correctly index it. Using meta tags that describe your business niche specifically is of great value to the search engine spider and will give you higher rankings.
Know the formatting tricks.
Placing your keywords in bold type also tips off the search engine spider that this word is important. Put your most important keywords in H1 tags, with other keywords that are less important in H2 and H3 tags. Also, naming your pictures your keywords gives the algorithm another instance of the keyword that it views very positively.
One way links are essential.
One way links tell the search engine spider that the page that is linked to is important to the linker, which raises the value of that site in its eyes. One way link to your landing page from your social network profiles.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential in order to get higher ranking in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. A higher position in the search engines will drive your customer enquiries and sales.