SEO Basics for Small Business Website Owners
Search engines are the No1 tool for finding information/products and services on the Internet.
Getting your website listed and ranked well in the search engines is important for most small businesses as more and more people use the search engines to find products and services.
So how do you get your website in the search engines and ranked well so that potential clients find your site?
You could get an SEO professional to do it for you but SEO services tend to be very costly and not really focused on small businesses like plumbers,restaurants, service professionals etc.
Alternatively you can do it yourself (DIY).
The purpose of this site is to help those of you who want/need to follow the DIY approach.
It should also useful to those who have used and SEO expert/company and want a better understanding of what they are doing and if what they are doing is really necessary.
How Difficult is SEO? Is DIY Feasible
The truth that many SEO experts don’t really want to admit is that basic SEO is not difficult to do.
It just requires that you have a basic understanding of how the search engines work and what they want to see on your website.
Getting Started
So let’s start simple with… What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of creating and organising web pages so that they achieve high rankings in the search engine results (SERPS).
By high what we typically seek to achieve is page 1, and where possible, in the first 5 organic results on page 1.
If the term organic has already started the confusion ball rolling it is because most people are actually unaware of of how the search engine results page (SERP) is structured .
The search engine results page is simply the page with the search results after you have initiated a search on the search engine by entering your search term, and hitting return.
The article- Understanding The Search Results Page explains the how results pages is structured and what organic,paid and local listings are and how you identify them.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is concerned with both the main organic listings and local listings.
Local listings are relatively new and have added a new dimension to local search.
It is crucial that you appreciate the difference between the main organic listings and the local listings. See Universal and Local Search for more details.
How To use This Site
For Beginners I suggest that you start with the Basic SEO training Workshop which provides a structured learning approach.
The site contains articles,tips, tutorials and videos on SEO and local SEO specifically targeted at the small business website owner.
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