Search engine optimization is fine, however, small business owners should remember one important lesson – the Google Bot has never ever made a purchase; your customers do. There’s an interesting interview with Hamlet Batista that discusses how too much SEO can harm a website, and it can. Your web pages need to be written so that potential customers can access your content quickly and easily. The article discusses, for example, changing navigation links to match keywords. If customers find your navigation links a little confusing, they may just leave, and that’s going to cost you business.

Drawing traffic from search engines just to boost traffic numbers is not the best way to run a business. You are often better off drawing less traffic from a search engine whilst increasing the quality of that traffic. As a business, conversions are the most important metric, so your SEO efforts should be targeting quality traffic, not just ‘any’ traffic.

Traffic, even from a search engine, is not free. SEO takes time, and that’s either time away from your business or a cost to a business when you engage others to perform it for you. An experienced SEO professional will help you target your efforts towards quality traffic. This doesn’t mean you should totally ignore traffic of a lower quality, by all means, attract that traffic if you wish, but not by making on page changes that could hurt the conversion rate of your quality traffic. Batista makes the following point:

The key principle is to first make sure the site, the content, the layout, and the instruction and navigation makes sense for the users because …. you are not optimizing the site for the search engine bots to make a purchase. You have to optimize it for the user.

It’s an interesting situation for small businesses, especially those in competitive markets. SEO is designed to get the best search results, however, your website should be designed to achieve conversion goals from visitors. The real key is to get the balance right, and it can be done.

Search engine optimization (or SEO) is often made out to be some strange and scary beast that only professionals dare go near. In reality, SEO is a tame beast. In fact, it’s a beast that you have a lot of control over. Sure, once you get past the basics, SEO can be time consuming, and perhaps even frustrating at times, but in reality, it’s still a simple concept.

For a web site to rank well, it’s necessary to understand what goes into the ranking process. SEO is the process of optimizing your pages (and web site) to gain the best position possible in search rankings. And that process is, as I have mentioned, fairly simple – there are only three steps:

1. Discovery – search engines need to find your content, however, I wouldn’t leave it to their efforts alone. Search engines need help and that help comes initially in the form of sitemaps that are submitted. You can expedite this process by creating a Google Webmaster Tools account – there you can submit your sitemaps encouraging the search engine to visit and crawl through your website.
2. Indexing – the second step in the SEO process is to have your pages indexed. You could submit a sitemap with 100 pages, and still find that a search engine has only indexed half the pages. External links to your pages can help as can social media mentions. It also helps if your web pages are easy to find, and easy to crawl. Pages that are deep within a website often fail to get indexed. Search engines will often only travel three or four links deep into a website. Your web pages should be easy for a search engine to read – that means ensuring your content is as close to the top as possible (of the root index file), and that Java and Flash are limited and SEO friendly as well.
3. Ranking - the hardest step in the process is ranking. This is where a page is compared to other pages and ranked for search terms. You can increase a page’s ranking by building inbound links and by gaining social media mentions. This is one area where website owners make life harder for themselves. The real key to ranking well is to create content that others find useful, that others will reference on their sites (inbound) links, and that people will discuss on social media sites (social media mentions).

SEO is the sum of those three activities and you will never succeed if you skimp on one area. You can have the best content in the world, however, if a search engine can’t find it, or finds it impossible to read when it does find it, then it won’t rank. Likewise, poor content will not receive the external support that is so vital to rank a page highly.

In a nutshell, build your site, tell the search engines where your content is, and make sure it easy to find and easy to read and that the content is worthy of ranking. Get that right and you have created a great SEO platform to build on.

The art of SEO for small business has changed considerably in recent years. Google has certainly changed the way small businesses develop their websites – at least, it should have. In most cases, business owners have stuck to their traditional approach, then moaned a little when a Google update has resulted in a drop in their site’s search results placement.

Whether we like it or not, if we rely on traffic from Google, then we need to play by their rules. Yet those rules are really fairly simple – provide quality content that has been created for your visitors. The term “natural” is bandied around a lot today, yet that is really the best approach to designing a website.

What then is meant by the term “natural”. You can look at this term in two ways – what you publish on your website and what other people publish on their website. Your website should be user-focused.  Links are a good example. Your internal link structure should be “natural” in that keywords used to create links are a natural part of the document and the link is a natural flow – in other words, if you have a page that discusses horses, you don’t have internal links to chickens unless there is a natural link. At the same time, your content should contain links to external sites that are, once again, “natural”.

You can then extend this philosophy to your external link building campaigns. Links are still important, although they will, over time, become less important. If you are building external links to your webpages, keep those links “natural”. Those links should be designed to add value to a reader rather than annoy, or look totally out of place.

Does “natural” mean you ignore other SEO for small business strategies? Certainly not. You can still develop keywords while remaining natural. You can still optimize images and videos, and you can still create page titles that are search engine friendly. In the first instance, focus on your visitors, then focus on search engines while not undermining a users experience. It’s a bit of juggling act, however, it’s still achievable, and you are satisfying three masters – the user, the search engine, and your business.

Anyone who has surfed the internet for several years will remember the early days when you had to search for something with several words separated by + signs. Sometimes you got good results and sometimes you didn’t. It all depended on how you phrased the words. It could cause a migraine to say the least.

With new Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics, it has become much easier to find what you are looking for. And now, you can usually find what you are wanting with a very simple term, such as cell phones. The search engines then pull several pages of cell phones.

Google is the most used search engine with 65.3% of users while Yahoo dropped to 15.5% according to SearchEngineWatch. Google even uses auto-complete to finish the search for you. It is not always right, but it’s quite eery to think that a computer can actually finish our sentences as well as it does.

Small businesses can take advantage of this by branding their business. If you have a unique name, brand it so that the search engines will catch it with just one word. For example, say your business is named “Tiny’s,” and you deliver pizza. A search for that one word by someone in your town could pull up your business so that consumers can find you. Of course, a lot of times it’s not that easy to brand your business.

But, if you want to move up in the ranks of the search engines, think along the lines of branding something that will be unique to your business. Between a brand and a logo, you could in essence have your online business grow as you have never imagined it would. If necessary, search for small business consultants who can help you get your name out there.

There are all kinds of ways to advertise your small business on the Internet. From social media to search engine optimization (SEO) to classified sites. While all are good, which one really stands out? More small businesses are going with SEO because the visitors to their sites got there by doing a search for something that related to their business.

This drives rate conversions up more than social media as a search is more targeted to a specified thing. Don’t get me wrong, many businesses use social media and are quite successful with it. That is great! But, effective SEO delivers far more traffic and converts better.

It works like this. Someone, a consumer, is searching for plus size clothing. Their search on Google will be “plus size clothing”. Once the search button is clicked on, Google does it’s thing and pulls all the businesses that have plus sized clothing. That’s how you get the long list of sites to choose from.

Eventually, when you get more and more customers, you will move up through the ranks to the first page. And, that’s exactly where you want to be. It’s already been proven, most people searching for something typically will not move past the firsts page of search results.

You’re thinking that’s great, but how do I do it? If you are not sure how to go about optimizing your place on the internet, it would be a good time to seek out SEO consultants. SEO consultants can sit down with you and customize a plan that will benefit you the most. And, it will be much easier to let the SEO consultant do that for you as they know what they are doing.

It may cost a little to get a consultant, but you don’t want to let your website sit with only a handful of visitors. That will not do you any good at all. A sound investment of hiring an SEO consultant will drive more traffic to your site and your conversion rates will rise. Now that’s a plan.

As I’ve written before, having a successful SEO strategy involves a number of elements, with getting your content out there being foremost among them. But having links is still an important part of the larger strategy. Recently, I’ve written about the importance of making your links diversified and able to fit naturally into a body of text. I’d like to now try to complement that advice with another important link consideration: locality.

A successful inbound link is one that can appropriately mirror a potential consumer’s internet search. If your business sells replacement tires, for example, the keyword “replacement tires” may appropriately boost your page rank with your target consumer. The consumer will, theoretically, go online, search Google for the keyword, and then click on a website with one of the highest page ranks for search results.

But consumers treat Google searches as a modern form of white pages: not only do they seek out a product, such as replacement tires, but they want to find that product somewhere near their home. Someone who lives on the East Coast would have no interest in a tire company located in California, no matter how applicable that company may be to their search or how high it may appear on Google’s results.

As a consequence of this, many Google users will try to track down a business by entering a desired product and then a local area. They may search, for example, for “replacement tires Chicago” or “replacement tires 60614.” These searches are far more beneficial to the potential consumer. Not only can they narrow on a business, but they can find one that operates in their area.

A business that is looking to boost their SEO through inbound links should keep this in mind. If you operate in a local area, making that area part of your keyword can improve your page rank while saving you money. After all, most people click on one of the first few results when performing a Google search. To move up the list and have a page rank that high for the search “replacement tires” is quite a tall order. For most companies, it would probably require a tremendous amount of time and money. But being one of the top results for “replacement tires Pittsburgh” is probably more attainable. And – most importantly – it can ultimately bring you more business.

Online marketers like to talk about the long tail, but what is it and why is it so important?

Of course, many online marketers don’t do anything about the long tail. The might talk about it. But you’ll notice, if you watch for long, that they don’t do anything about it.

Think of search engine results as a lizard. If it helps, picture a chameleon. They have a pretty head. Colorful. And everyone likes to look at it. Everyone wants a head like a chameleon. But what about that tail? It’s long. It isn’t the head. It doesn’t have the brain. But it’s important. It has power.

The long tail in search is the search phrase that not many of your competition is focusing on. Yet, it has power. Not as much as the head. But then, it isn’t as colorful or pretty as the head either.

It’s just not the most attractive part of the lizard.

The most attractive search terms are those terms that everyone is going after. But they’re difficult to dominate. There’s a lot of competition. And you have to work your butt off to get to the top rank. With the long tail, on the other hand, since there isn’t as much competition you don’t have to work as hard. You may not see the same level of results as you would with a “head,” but the results you do get yield a profit.

Go for the long tail first. Secure a few of the long tail search phrases before you go for the head. Work your way up the lizard, not down.

Search engine marketing professionals love to talk about ranking factors. Sometimes they get a little too deep in the weeds. But I like what Danny Sullivan has done at Search Engine Land in creating The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors.

I like that he kept is simple and that he made it visual. That’s a big leap forward in terms of learning SEO for someone new to the game. Let’s highlight a few things.

• First, notice that on-page factors are really important for SEO, and the most important ranking factors are the quality of your content and the quality of your keyword research.
• In terms of HTML, title tags are the most important ranking factor.
• And for site architecture, making your site crawlable is extremely important.
• Off-page factors that are important including link quality and anchor text at the very top with trust and authority also important. Country and locality are important on the “personal” scale, though I must admit I’m not sure what he means by that.

For negative factors, if your site is blocked often in the search engines or through social sharing, then you will lose rank. Also, cloaking and link buying are big no-nos.

While I’m aware that every SEO will have his or her own preferences, I for one at least agree with Danny on the big picture. The most important things to think about in terms of SEO are quality content, quality links, and building trust. If you do those things you’ll go a long way to earning search engine ranking status and you won’t have to chase the algorithms.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the process that webmasters use to get their pages ranked in the search engines. It’s not the only online marketing strategy available, but it’s still effective.

Even in an age of semantic language indexing, web page optimization strategies that involve keyword management are still viable and still effective.

Consider that most of your competition don’t practice sound SEO strategies in their content marketing efforts. If you do, that will give you a distinct advantage over your competition. So what makes for sound SEO practices?

Believe me, it’s not difficult. But the work is tedious. You must be able to determine which keyword phrases are most profitable for your niche and that match your marketing goals. Then, you’ve got to be able to implement a good SEO strategy that creates results in the search engine results pages. That’s getting to be more and more difficult every day.

You should probably start by ignoring the advice you see on the average SEO blog. Instead, focus on speaking in the language of your audience. Don’t count keywords. Just write naturally – BUT, ensure that you sprinkle (and I do mean sprinkle) your primary keyword throughout your content starting with your page title. Add a link or two (but no more) using your primary keyword or a variant as anchor text on that page. Build inbound links.

SEO is still an effective way to market web pages in 2011. And I’m sure it will be in 2012. Just don’t overdo it on the keyword targeting.

If you listen to some search engine optimization professionals, SEO is dead – if it was ever alive. But I don’t think so even if you consider that a lot of it is really natural language in disguise.

Let me explain.

The best thing you can do for your website content is write it in natural language mode. That is, don’t focus on keywords. Just write like you would normally write or talk. You will rank for key terms related to your niche if you do that.

However, keywords are important. They’re not so all-important that you should cram them into your content like stuffing a duffle bag for a camping trip. Yet, they are important enough that you should be aware you are using them.

In essence, I’d say good SEO is natural language with a cognizance of the importance of keyword selection.

In other words, if you are writing about children’s clothing because you make children’s clothes that are affordable and durable, then why wouldn’t you use the phrase “children’s clothing” in your content? You would because it’s natural. You don’t have to go overboard to cram your keyword into your content so you can make sure you rank for it. All you have to do is write naturally.

That said, you should also make a conscious effort to ensure you write a natural language headline using your keyword, you use alt tags that employ your keyword, and pay attention to a few other small SEO details along the way. Just don’t give up on natural language.