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Small Businesses Can Increase Website Revenue and Leads Through SEO

Rodney Ringler

March 26, 2009

Small businesses are struggling in these tough economic times. They are in a pinch, needing to cut costs, but also increase revenue and customer base. How do you grow your business when you are cutting costs? One avenue is shifting more of your marketing focus to the internet and onto your website. With a little training you can learn enough Search Engine Optimization techniques to put your website at the top of search engine pages for your important keywords(search terms). Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is free and requires no costs, which can bring you free leads and customers for years to come.

If your business's Marketing Plan does not include an SEO section you should add one immediately. SEO for most small businesses is not as much work as you think because you are not going for some of the most competitive keywords. For example, trying to rank high for a popular generic keyword like "real estate" is very hard, but ranking high for "fort mill real estate" is much easier.

The 3 most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. There are also many smaller search engines as well as industry specific directories that you can rank high in to generate traffic. Even though the major search engines have their own algorithms they all operate on the same basic principles. To rank high for a keyword, 2 things have to happen. First, your web page needs to be deemed relevant for that keyword, and secondly, you must have a high page ranking. Search engine rankings have nothing to do with how much traffic you receive. Search engines also treat each page of a website separately, and will rank them separately.

Obtaining relevance for your web pages for your keywords requires going through each page in your website one time and making some changes which include:

- Put the keywords in the text through the site.
- Put the keywords in the Page Title
- Put the keywords in the meta description and keywords
- Put alt tags with keywords on all images

An SEO book or internet search will teach you even more. For the most part this is a one time task and not one that requires work every week. Now your site is optimized and in the list when someone searches.

The second step of obtaining a high page rank allows you to rise to the top of the list for your search terms and get on the first page of a search. This is an ongoing part, but the work is free and does not require that much time each week. The whole key to page rank is incoming links. These are links from other websites to your website. The major search engines rank your web pages by who and how many other web pages link to you. Ranking has nothing to do with traffic to your website. The general theory is - if someone is willing to link to you and direct their visitors to you, then you must have some quality content. Getting links from high ranking sites and/or sites related to yours help more, but all incoming links help.

The following is a list of ways to gain incoming links.

- Develop link partnerships with related websites. You place a link to their website on yours and they do the same.

- Submit articles/press releases to online article sites with links to your site in the article or bio at the end. We use a list of over hundred sites including www.EzineArticles.com and www.GoArticles.com as well as business specific content sites.

- Post to forum boards related to your business. Always have a link to your site in the signature of every post.

- Create/reply to blogs. Always put links in your post's signature and blogs.

- Submit your site to the thousands of online directories and search engines.

These basics can get you started and a class or book can teach you more. Ranking high for the right terms will bring you free targeted leads for a long time. What better lead is there than someone searching specifically for your products or services.

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