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How Small Businesses Find Their Way on the Internet

Small businesses don’t typically have a whole lot of money to spend on advertising. They search for ways to get their name out to the public as efficiently as possible, word of mouth is great. However, a very large amount of small businesses are starting to use the internet to promote themselves. This is because they can experience the best and most efficient results from internet marketing. Their message and advertising campaign can be customized and tailored to their specific needs in thousands of ways.

Almost all small businesses nowadays have websites. This is the window for the world to see them through; their personal viewing portal that can be accessed by anyone at any time. With a million small businesses comes a million websites, so now the key is to get your site found. Every small businesses website can bring them to greater successes in their business.

Creating a sound SEO (Search Engine Optimization) program is one option to choose from when advertising on the internet. It is one of the best marketing methods and produces one of the highest ROI’s.
Choosing to use a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign can be effective for specific products, especially during the holiday season!
Another good way to add to your websites traffic is to keep a steady stream of information flowing through the site. Blogging with good relative content can be an extremely effective way of keeping your consumer interested. If they have visited your site they are clearly interested in your service or product and may want to stay informed.
Social media is another good way for consumers to follow your company which allows you to provide good material on your product or service for the consumer to digest in their own life on their own time.

With an ever-growing Internet population keeping a strong presence on the internet for your small business is critical in the growth process. A good website with streaming content that can be found by those who need it will thrive on the internet. This type of website will allow for a company to grow beyond its current potential and reach new heights in sales.

If you’re small business is looking for an SEO consultant, look at www.seosolutions.us. We are a Chicago SEO company that specializes in Search Engine Marketing and other Internet marketing techniques.

SEO – It Takes Time

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Search Engine Optimization is a process. During the first years of search you could get away with grabbing keywords and stuffing them into your website to drive rankings. Another method people used to get away with was using meaningless links from and to their websites. Google’s algorithm has changed immensely since 1998 when it was introduced to the public. Now if you want your website to appear on the first page of Google there are several important steps to take and some things to avoid as well.

First things first, content is king. Having a website with good content is extremely important. Having the right amount of keywords mixed into that content is also important. To many keywords can get your rankings lowered while to little keywords can do the same thing. Maintaining a relevant website that provides people with important information will not only increase your rankings but will also increase your websites retention rate which is just the amount of first time visitors that return to your website for a second and third view.

Second, links are no longer viewed as always being a good thing. Google has caught onto the fact that people are link farming; simply linking to as many websites as they can (relevant or not) in an attempt to increase their websites rankings. In order to maintain your rankings or increase them your link building needs to be appropriate. Linking to other sites related to yours that are seen as ‘good’ sites by Google (meaning they follow the rules and provide relevant content) is a great way to increase rankings.

Third, don’t think keywords and good content is the silver bullet. Stay in the mix of things by creating strong social presence; Google and other search engines are taking into account social circles more than ever. In an attempt to compete with Facebook, Google launched Google circles, a new social media site where you can invite people into different circles based on their relationship to you; work, school, friends, family. These social circles (facebook or Google Circles/Google+) are the new way for Google to start ranking how important/relevant your site is.

Finally, stay relevant with good OFFPAGE optimization. Some good ways to do this is to write articles about your industry and submit them to article directories which are basically phone directories for websites on the internet. While articles are great, you can blog about your industry and stay social while doing it. Creating a blog that people read and learn from is a great way to bring traffic to your website. You can also guest blog on other peoples websites in order to increase your online presence.

Remember that content is King! Good content and the right targeted keywords will increase your rankings. Stay focused on good content with about 8% keywords and brining your website efforts to social media and other online activities such as blogging and you will have a nice SEO start.

www.seosolutions .us – An Illinois SEO company, Chicago based.

A Few Words on SEO / Important UPDATES!

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SEO UPDATES!

Search has become one of the best marketing tactics to increase ROI since marketing was invented. Not only does it produce results but it allows the marketer to geo-target, check important analytics and act on those analytics to implement stronger and stronger campaigns month after month.

With the new Panda Updates Google has deployed websites that use a tactic called link farming are being punished. Farming links, which is at its core, building links to your site to make it look popular when the content is nothing but garbage. So what do we do now? Well those of us who use unique content and a little bit of hard work to drive rankings are in luck. We continue to blog and write press releases every week. That’s how you stay relevant; you give people what they want without shoving it down their throats!

The beauty of a good search campaign is that once you deploy all the right tactics and you “get rolling”. It is much easier for you to continue to drive your rankings. The tough part is getting started. This may be because results aren’t immediate and small businesses typically don’t have money to blow without seeing an ROI relatively fast. However, medium sized businesses seem to stick around long enough to truly reap the benefits of a campaign that is driven and lead to a strong online community and presence that is interactive and growing.

Search Engine Optimization: The Basics

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Let’s concentrate on the basics. What exactly is search engine optimization? It is the process (and it is a process indeed) of organizing your site with specific keywords while creating links to your site via social media, blogging and other marketing venues.

Keywords can be single words or phrases. A keyword for a construction company may be for example; Campbell Construction, Illinois. This keyword would be considered a phrase. Notice how Illinois is also attached the end of the phrase. This is an excellent way to geo-target your marketing audience. This also works by county, township and can also be done using zip codes.

Another huge aspect of creating a great Search Campaign is making sure that the site is set up correctly on-page. This may be anything from having a strong domain name to load-time to having strong written content, and the amount of content and the specific ratios of keywords mixed into your content will affect rankings.

However, off page optimization is also important, these are all the activities performed away from the website but are in one way or another linked back to your website. Off page optimization activities range from a large number of things from blogging, to social media campaigns to video creation and deployment, press releases and more. It is important for most businesses to concentrate on their own business while hiring an outside firm to implement a strong online campaign that will boost search engine rankings.

Shocking Statistics about Search:

Google is the most popular search engine.
Over 500 million searches are completed daily
85% of online traffic only views the first page on search engines
85% of traffic finds accurate information which is useful to them.
81% of online users find new websites from using search engines.
73% of online transactions start with the use of search engines

SEO: Search Engine Optimization – Your Path To Profits

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Why SEO and Who Needs It
In this age of information when searching for something on the Internet people normally look it up in popular search engines like: Google, Alexa, Gigablast, or Yahoo. They do not go beyond the first or second page of the searched results i.e. the first 20-40 of the hundreds of thousands results popped up by the search engines. If the information is available on the Internet, it is found, more often than not, in these first few search results. Browsing through the top websites thrown up by the search engines related to the information suffices. Studies on internet search behavior and eye tracking have confirmed this.

As obtaining information and doing business online has become a popular practice, individuals and organizations that are conducting business on the Internet fully or partially should be more visible on the Internet. Websites of such organizations need to come up among the top ten/twenty of the search results to be noticed by people. Small businesses as well as large organizations that depend on online business need to rank high up on the search engines. The higher the rank of a website more is its number of visitors, and possibly more business for the website.

The websites that come at the top of the search engine results are not there by accident. Careful planning, designing, and programming are the factors behind pushing the ranking of a website higher up. The process of elevating a website to a better ranking and higher visibility is known as search engine optimization (SEO).

How SEO Works
Imagine the World Wide Web to be a huge library stacked up with innumerable websites. When somebody tries to search for specific information using a search form, a robot (much like a library assistant) scans the relevant section of the library of websites. Similar to libraries that have categorized sections for books, the search engines have indexes for the crawlers to search through. The robot (also known as spider or crawler) searches through HTML data bases and selects the most relevant websites first. Search engines use different algorithms to judge relevance of websites to the information searched for.

SEO consultants help in designing websites by using keywords and other methodologies. They attempt to make the meta tags, contents, and links of the websites become more tractable for search engine algorithm. Search engines outline their own policies of search engine optimization and it’s the responsibility of the SEO consultant to adhere to those. Failing which search engines can ban websites. Therefore SEO consultants have to strike a balance between ‘keyword stuffing or spamdexing’ and ‘paucity of keywords’.

Search engine optimization has gained importance with the growth of online business. A website foraying in to the World Wide Web without using SEO techniques is akin to a soldier rushing in to battle without a gun. Obviously, SEO is being hailed as a valuable marketing tool.”No wonder, SEO is being hailed as a valuable marketing tool.