Link Building Tips for Quality SEO of Business Websites

When you begin the task of acquiring quality and relevant backlinks to your website there are many factors that can increase or decrease your search engine rankings. This article outlines the difference between good and bad backlinks.

A quality backlink pointing to your site should be in the same category and relevant in content to your website. The page where your link is located should be indexed by Google and the page should also have a Google page rank. The webpage where your link is located should also contain no more than 30 other out-going links to other websites. Link pages with more than 30 out-going links are less relevant to the search engines. Having your link posted on this type of webpage can affect your search engine rankings in a negative way. Other excellent techniques of acquiring backlinks are directory submissions, posting articles, blogs and forums.

For directory submissions select the proper directory category and take a look at how many other websites are contained in the category where your link would be posted, if you can manage to get on the first or second page of the listings, this is a quality backlink. Also look at the Google page rank of the landing page for your link. If the page has a Google page rank this is also a quality backlink.

Stay within your category, relevant content is very important to the search engines. Write an article preferably relevant in content to your website and submit the article to high quality article directories. Blogs are an excellent way to get quality one-way backlinks, Blog sites also receive tons of traffic, which in turn give your site more exposure. Posting your link on forum pages is also an efficient method of acquiring backlinks instantly.

Backlinks to avoid would be a zero page ranked webpage, especially if the home page has a zero page rank. Links posted within framed webpages which will also steal your traffic. Especially avoid link farms, webpages which contain more than 100 unrelated outgoing links, This type of link page is frowned upon by many major search engines. Avoid Webpages with mirror sites containing the exact same content with a different URL, also pages that utilize redirects and URL cloaking. Never post your link on a webpage that contains a "no follow" or "no index" robots meta tag within the source code. Dynamic websites with question marks in the URL should be avoided because they are not always indexed by the search engines.

Avoid posting your link on a page that opens very slow or contains mostly ads and flash banners. Try not to acquire or purchase great numbers of backlinks in a short period of time, backlinks should be accumulated gradually. Also avoid webpages and directories that list their results in alphabetical order, as their database increases your link could be moved to a less relevant page with less pagerank. Quality backlinks are one of the most important factors involved in the process of achieving high search engine ranking.

Local Business Website Visitors Generating Tips

Every business faces strong challenges for local marketing and making web presence in its locality. Especially for small businesses generating local traffic is a complicated mission. Local customers provide the support that small businesses need to keep going, which makes optimizing your website for local search engine rankings even more important.

1). Find Reliable Hosting Near your Region:
Before you start any website project, you need a reliable place to host it. Look for a hosting service that provides enough bandwidth to support site pages, the types of media you’re planning to use and the amount of traffic you’re expecting to get. Without this, your site is likely to go down without warning. Downtime means disappointed customers and losses in sales.

2). Optimize for Local Business Keywords:
You already know how important keywords are for SEO, but you have to put effort into ranking for local keywords. For that you may Hire SEO Experts, who will take care of your website SEO campaign. Customers in your area are likely to use some kind of location-based term when searching for local products and services. If you’re a cookie company in Vermont, for example, don’t just optimize for “fresh cookies.” Try phrases such as “fresh cookies in Vermont” or “homemade cookies in Montpelier.” Incorporate these phrases into your website text, page titles and meta description tags in a way that flows naturally.

3). Include Local Address:
Putting your business address and contact information somewhere prominent on your front page makes it easy for customers to get in touch with you. Putting it on all of your pages alerts search engines to where you are and can help deliver more useful results in location-based searches. While you’re at it, why not embed a map as well? That way, customers can see exactly where your business is in relation to their own locations and find you more easily.

4). Get Listed on Local Directories:
There are many online directories that allow you to list your business along with contact information, photos and sometimes even videos. Getting your business on Google Places, Yahoo Local, Yelp, Superpages and other local search directories verifies that you’re in business and lets you update your listings whenever necessary. Being listed can also give your search rankings a boost over and above the competition.

5). Linking Local Websites:
A good network of relevant backlinks helps to show search engines that your site is of high quality and worth crawling. Local backlinks from sources such as other businesses, local resource listings and pages for special community events give your company local credibility. Seek out a variety of links that will help establish your identity. When others link to you, make sure that they do so in a way that incorporates your highest-performing local keywords.

6). Use Social Media:
People love to share where they’ve been and what they liked about it, and this is where social media comes in handy for small businesses. On Facebook, for example, business Pages put location, hours and contact information right near the top. When users “like” your page, the action shows up in their news feeds for their networks to see. You can also target important updates to specific locations, so it’s easy to let followers in your community know about limited-time sales, special offers and other location-specific events.

7). Gather User Reviews:
On many search directories, customers can leave reviews of their favorite businesses. You won’t have any direct control over whether these reviews are positive or negative, but the feedback you get will help you make business decisions to better serve your customers in the future. Some sites allow you to reply to user reviews, giving you a chance to ask questions, resolve problems and establish yourself as a reliable presence in the community.

Making sure that your business website is designed to draw local traffic is worth the necessary time and effort. Local traffic not only brings in customers from around the community; it also boosts your reputation in nearby areas by generating Internet buzz and increasing consumer feedback. Local traffic has the potential to boost sales and raise brand awareness in the areas that are most important to your marketing efforts.

SEO Tips for Promoting your Business Websites Online

1). Choosing Targeted Keywords:

The most important aspect of using business targeted keywords for your website is to begin a process of searching keywords with proper analysis and research. Be sure to take advantage of any types of free tools or services, which may be at your disposal. A good example of this would be the Google Adwords tool. You might also want to consider using a portion of your advertising budget to pay for some more comprehensive programs.
It is also very essential to note that keyword density, as this considered to be outdated these days. It is crucial that you do your best to include keywords naturally within the text of your website while ensuring that you are not doing this to excess.

2). Create an Outstanding URL:

There are quite a few things that you must do in order to create an outstanding URL. From the start, you need to choose a domain name that is relatively short which also includes your most valuable keyword phrase. Hyphens are allowed and acceptable, but you should refrain from adding any more than two.
When it comes to individual page naming, be sure to include a highly relevant keyword. Do your very best not to use any session IDs or other dynamic and database variable URLs.

3). Utilize Long-tail Keywords:

Long-tail keywords offer the highest impact on search engine rankings. These typically consist of a minimum of three words. If you’re able to come up with some that are intrinsically related to your specific industry, it will knock the competition right out! In addition, any traffic that is driven to your site as a result will be much more relevant which means a better end result.

4). Utilize Latent Semantic Indexing: 

Latent semantic indexing, commonly referred to as LSI, is the process in which you include related phrasing and keywords with your main phrases in an effort to elevate your site’s ranking within the various search engines. For example, if your site sells shoes, you would include other related words such as heels, pumps, sandals and boots. This would, in turn, help to elevate your rankings within the search engines. This would also ensure that your site does not come across as any type of spam since you wouldn’t be using the same old keywords again and again.

5). Make Your Internal Links Count:

Most websites often forget to use their internal links properly and that puts them at a disadvantage from the very beginning. It’s an extremely simple way to ensure that each and every one of your pages score a better targeted ranking within the entire various search engines. Ensure that you include every page most targeted keyword or phrase within internal links, which are pointing to those pages. Additionally, make sure to always reference any of your other pages with links within your website’s content as appropriate.

6). Invest in PPC:

A PPC campaign is the absolute fastest way to see immediate results from your advertising dollars. Begin your campaign using all of the keyword research that you’ve done previously. Start with a small PPC costs can skyrocket if you are not familiar with how it works. Play around with different style ads. Use varying strategies and keywords until you see some definitive results. Only then should you begin running bigger campaigns.

7). Optimize any Images Used:

It’s crucial that you use an ALT tag for all of your images that describes in detail what the actual image consists of. Use targeted keywords and phrases for maximum impact. This will ensure that those who are not able to see images will still have an understanding of what is in that location. This also ensures that you can be found within image-based searches. In addition, do your best to name your images using a keyword within the actual file name.

8). Optimize the Title Tag:
 
Do not fool yourself. You should not just put anything in your title tag and expect it to be sufficient. If you think that, you can’t possibly be any further from the actual truth. The page title offers an outstanding opportunity to increase your ranking while also attracting people to your site.
Your title tag should be no more than 70 characters long. Keep it short, simple and to the point. Additionally, make sure that every single page must have its own specific title. Do your best to include your targeted keywords into the title and try to be extremely descriptive.

9). META Tag Insight:

Be aware that the META keywords tag is not reflecting on by Google for ranking anymore, although some of the other engines might still be using it. Most important are the META description tags and title. Make sure to limit your title to 70 characters or less and ensure that your META description is 160 characters or less. If you go over that, the various search engines will simply cut it off. Always remember to utilize your targeted keywords in your META tags.

10). Do NOT do – Building Links:
 
For the most part, many people do all of the wrong things when it comes to building links for their site. Please, do NOT buy links or use a “link farm.” Those are two of the worst things you could possibly do. Do your best to avoid any low quality directories that could be construed as “spam.” Blog commenting, link exchanging and posting on various forums are not as valuable as they once used to be. Additionally, it looks extremely unnatural if you were to suddenly have thousands of links within the span of a few short days. Remember, its quality versus quantity.

11). What to Do – Building Links: 

The best thing to do is to submit your links to respected directories such as Best of the Web and DMOZ. Try to focus on creating links to others within your own industry or niche. This will definitely improve your reputation within the community. Do your best to use unique content that can serve as bait for your website. These days, social networks can be highly beneficial.

12). Don’t Ignore Canonicalization:

It’s imperative that you ensure that your pages are not being counted more than one time. This will confuse all of the search engines and possibly impact your tracking statistics. Make sure to use 310 redirects to transport pages to one homepage and fix all issues with the rest of your pages as well.

13). HTML is Best:
 
Other program languages such as JavaScript aren’t searchable in search engines and so they are of no benefit to you. Make sure that you use only HTML so that you are automatically increasing your page rank. Don’t ever over complicate your site by using lots of frames, forms or code types that are unsearchable.

14). Choose Right SEO Professionals:

If you want to promote your website online, choose experienced SEO professionals/company having good experience of optimizing websites. Think about your budget, try to invest less and continue this. Because SEO is a long term process and should not be stopped. You just monitor the works and give the professionals your feedbacks. For starting SEO for your website at a minimum budget contact SEO Company India.

Updating Low Quality Pages Improves SEO Effort of your Website

There are many websites that have recently lost Google traffic, the main cause is lots of low-quality content pages. This sort of low-quality content was probably created by some scammy SEOs in an attempt to boost search engine rankings. This was low-quality content that was naturally created with no thought of the search engines.

Impact of Low Quality Content:
Before the Google’s Panda filters, most likely, nothing. But when Google did the Panda update, some pages on some websites that were previously ignored, started to cause rankings and traffic problems for the overall website.

Contains of Low-Quality content pages:
In most cases, the low-quality content pages simply doesn’t contain much information at all. They may only have a few words or sentences outside of the global template of the page. Or they may contain information, but it’s very similar to what’s on other pages of the website. Most of the time these low-quality pages been dynamically generated by whatever content management system (CMS) the site is using. This is especially true of blog sites using WordPress or other blog software, as well as forum sites.
Let’s look at some specific types of low-quality content:

  1). Profile Pages:
Empty – Many forums, blogs or other community sites encourage people to become members. In order to do so, they have to provide information that is used to create a profile page of that person. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these, but some of them may be created with nothing more than a user name and a bunch of empty fields. So you can end up with hundreds, if not thousands, of nearly empty pages.

Spammy – Profiles have also been a target for spammers because some of them allow you to add links. Even those that don’t specifically allow links can sometimes be hacked to include a link by a smarter-than-average web spammer.

Recommended Fix: There are a few ways to deal with this. You could make profile pages invisible to anyone (including search engines) who isn’t registered and logged in. Or you could add the no index Meta tag to all profile pages. If you prefer to have your profile pages indexed, you might try to require more information than just a name so that there is a less chance of the profile seeming empty. And if you allow links, be sure they are automatically tagged with the no-follow attribute. You may also keep all profiles invisible until they go through a manual human review.

2).Empty Directory or Search Results Pages:
Websites that have a directory of sorts will often have a number of different categories. This is a great idea when there are enough items, people, or places that deserve to have their own category. But sometimes a website will get too granular in its categories and only have one (or sometimes zero) results contained within them. It’s easy to see how this creates a poor user experience, and thus a low-quality content page.

3).Tag Pages:
While adding tags to classify blog posts can make for a helpful way to browse a blog, creating an unlimited number of tags and tagging every post with a bunch of them creates tons of low-quality content tag pages. If a tag is so specific that only one post is tagged with it, the tag page itself will list only that one post. And if that post is tagged with other unique tags, a whole bunch of very similar stand-alone tag pages will be created that all just link to this one post, which means they’ve defeated the purpose of tagging as a means of categorizing posts.

Recommended Fix: Don’t use tags to stuff keywords on your pages. Instead, use them for their intended purpose by creating a limited number of them that correspond to their own unique category. This will provide an alternate way of browsing your blog, as well as more opportunities for Google to find and spider your pages.

If it’s too late to start over with your tags and you’ve already got a crazy array of meaningless tags, then add the rel=nofollow to the tag links themselves, and add the “noindex, follow” Meta tag to the resulting tag pages themselves. This way you won’t have all those duplicate pages indexed, but the search engines can still follow the links contained within them.

4). Posts That Simply Link to Something Else:
You see something interesting on another site that you want to tell your readers about, so you dash off a quick blog post that says, “Here’s an interesting article about whatever” and provide a link. Even worse is if you link to these “empty posts” from elsewhere on your site in the guise of providing actual information if they click the link. This only annoys your readers because they have to click yet again to get to what they really want to see.

Recommended Fix: A better place for quick recommendations would be to post it on your social media channels and/or link directly to the real content from elsewhere in your site where it makes sense to do so.

As you can see, whether or not you intended to have low-quality content pages on your website, you may have some anyway. Whether we agree with the way Google is handling this sort of content or not, the fact is, many sites have been negatively affected by it. Therefore you’d be smart to recheck your own site every so often for low-quality content and go through each of the recommended fixes to remove it ASAP.

Tips to Create Great Content within Minutes

As you know, content development is a complicated, time-consuming and expensive proposition. It is also very expensive for small business owners to afford that kind of effort. So they tried the new concept of micro-content, or creating small bits of marketing content within little time to blog, create videos or spend all day on Facebook.

Using the following ideas, you can develop sufficient micro-content for your social media marketing strategy devoting only few minutes a day for these activities.

Do a Proper Preparation:

Like any marketing initiative you must have a concrete idea about your strategy, selling points and targeting audience locations. Spend time thinking through a set of keywords that represent your business and your customer needs. You'll need to weave these keywords into your micro-content initiative. Once you have a complete idea of "your story," here are some content marketing options that work using few minutes a day:

1) Slideshare:

Even the most content-starved companies have PowerPoint slides. Upload your best public presentations to Slideshare for a very quick and effective way to begin populating the social web with meaningful content. Slideshare is highly indexed by the search engines and you can assign key words to every presentation. Make sure your last slide directs a viewer back to your website.

2) LinkedIn Forums:

LinkedIn is a goldmine of opportunity to create micro-content.

There are about 750,000 LinkedIn Groups covering every imaginable business interest. Go to the "search" function at the top of the page, highlight "groups" and look for a few of those have like-minded people who might be interested in you. If you are in a very specialized field, you may even consider starting your own interest group.

Now, look through the Q&A forums and get involved. Simply answering questions is providing meaningful content that can attract attention to you and your website. I have made some fantastic connections this way and acquired some great customers just by answering questions in LinkedIn Group Forums.

Make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete and helpful so people can learn about you when they "click" on your profile. Depending on your industry, spending at least 15 minutes a day participating in relevant LinkedIn forums can be very profitable.

3) Networking on Twitter:

This is the ultimate site for making connections through micro-content by building a targeted audience through Twitter. It makes no sense to work on micro-content on Twitter if you have nobody listening. Here is a suggested micro-content regimen if you're just starting to tweet.

1) Create a habit of sharing Information: Today, every article, post and video has a "tweet" button. When you read something that interests you, share it on Twitter. It takes but a moment.

2) Leverage your Networks: If you have surrounded yourself with interesting people, they're providing a stream of relevant content. When you find something great, re-tweet it! You don't have to generate everything yourself. "Re-purposing" other people's content takes almost no time all.

3) Try following the "3 x 3 x 3 rule”: If you are new and trying to figure what to do, tweet three times a day, at three different times of the day, on three different subjects: a) interesting non-work-related information you saw, heard or read; b) news related to your business, market or industry (use keywords), and c) your opinion on an item in the news or something funny.

Remember that micro-content is still supposed to do the job of big content drive people to action on your website. Of course you need to include your website in your profile and use your keywords in your bio-data.

Don't be overwhelmed by the wall of noise on Twitter. Use lists to focus on your most important contacts so that your moments of daily networking are well-utilized.

4) Connecting Through Comments:

Spending 15 minutes a day commenting on relevant blog posts, videos, and Facebook pages is a quick and easy way to deliver micro-content that packs a punch. Here are some examples:

• As small business owner I advised commented on a magazine's Facebook site and was invited to send her product to the editor for coverage.
• Adding your comment to relevant YouTube viral videos can create impressions with thousands of people who are interested in a related topic.
• My comment on a popular blog post contained a link to my website which is still receiving hits nine months later. That's not unusual since posts on popular topics can have a long "shelf life."
• Comments on my blog have resulted in new business partnerships, guest blogs, and freelance assignments for my readers.
• I find that comments can carry even more impact when they’re micro or small. People will read a few sentences, but probably just scan a few paragraphs. Are there blogs that your customers enjoy? Why not contribute to this rich content with your own comments? 

5) Micro-videos:

Videos are just so hot right now but you don't have to spend thousands of dollars and precious hours in the editing booth to create great content.

Within few minutes worth of work, I had interesting content for my blog which fed my Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel, G+ stream and LinkedIn status.

6) Micro-Content and Blogging:

There are so many great benefits to blogging but this is usually the place time-starved marketers stumble. Think about re-purposing micro-content on your website as a blog, even if it only happens once a month:

• Cut and paste answers you've already provided on LinkedIn and blog comments as new, unique posts.
• Start a blog post with, you found this interesting article through a link on Twitter and share the great content from one of your tweets.
• Embed a pre-existing company video or a Slideshare presentation as an original blog post.
• Share a relevant article, video or blog post from a trade publication and simply write a few sentences commenting on it.

A blog post does not have to be a PhD thesis. Using some of these techniques, you can literally create blog posts within minutes.

Hope the above tips are very helpful for writing informative content for your business website. Feel free to send your suggestions and comments for the enhancement of this blog. You can also contact me for SEO analysis and online promotion of your business website.  

Prepare Your Website for Future Google Updates

With the recent Penguin update that came down a few weeks ago from Google, a lot of site owners are wondering what they can do to recover from a search engine penalty. We know that Penguin was designed to target web spam tactics (Panda was more about content quality), and while glaring black hat tactics like keyword stuffing are easy to spot and fix, it's not always as simple to find the gray hat SEO tactics that might be contributing (or will with subsequent updates) to a search engine penalty. Many DIY SEO site owners run afoul of the Google Webmaster Guidelines simply because they don't realize they are doing anything wrong.

If your site has managed to escape unscathed by a Google update so far, don't assume that you're free and clear forever. Each search engine update gets a little better at catching and flagging sites that are in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines. Before you find yourself in emergency mode because your organic traffic was cut in half due to a penalty, here are 5 things every site owner can do to protect their website and ensure that future updates will only help their site perform better in the search engines:

1). Forget About Keyword Density

There is no "right" number of times you should use a keyword in any given piece of content. Forget every piece of advice you've ever heard about keyword density (2%, 6%, use each keyword at least three times!) and just focus on writing great content. One of the few hard and fast rules of SEO is that content should always be written for the human reader first, the search engines second. Believe it or not, a well-written piece of content will partially optimize itself because the topic naturally encourages you to use various keywords. You won't ever want to force a keyword into the content to meet some keyword count quota - it's almost always going to negatively impact the usability of your content. Of course you want to optimize your content for SEO, but worry about targeting keywords AFTER you've written the content. You can go back and tweak the post to be a little more SEO friendly in the revision round.

2). Diversify Your Anchor Text

A lot of SEO experts are hypothesizing that exact match anchor text might have been a big flag for the Penguin update. It's important to diversify your anchor text so the search engines don't have any reason to suspect that you might be trying to manipulate the SERPs. Branded keywords are probably going to make up a large percentage of your anchor text portfolio, but you don't want to rely too heavily on a short list of targeted keywords (and please don't use CLICK HERE as anchor text; it has no SEO value) for your anchor text. Much like with optimizing your content, there is no "right" number of times to use a particular keyword or keyword phrase as your anchor text.

3). Remove Questionable Links from Your Link Portfolio

In the weeks before Penguin, Google started sending out notifications to many site owners warning them about "unnatural links" in their link portfolio. These could be link exchanges, paid links, unrelated links, links from blogs and low quality directories and so forth. If there are any links in your link portfolio that might catch the eye of Google for the wrong reasons, it's best to do away with them now so you don't have to worry about it later. Keep in mind that a few "bad" links aren't going to destroy your SEO, especially if the vast majority of your link portfolio is full of great links. You can't control who links to you, which has made many site owners worry about the ramifications of negative SEO (a competitor would purposely link from dangerous sites to you to hurt your site). It's when you have an okay link portfolio or shady SEO past that you need to worry about scrubbing your link portfolio as quickly and effectively as you can.

Some SEO experts have also hypothesized that sites might feel a trickledown effect via their link portfolio. Even if your site wasn't hit by Penguin, if a lot of the sites linking to yours were those poor quality sites Google penalized, links from those sites become pretty much useless to your SEO. Your site may have escaped unharmed, but your link portfolio took a big hit.

4). Analyze the Value and Quality of Your Content

Ever since the first Panda update last year, just about every Google update since then has been focused on quality, especially content quality. It's hard to hold a mirror up to our own efforts sometimes, but take a good hard look at your content. Where is there room for improvement? Are there any thin pages that you could combine in order to make a strong page with a great user experience? Are there pages you should just delete entirely? Put yourself in the shoes of your customer - would you want to purchase from your brand? Is your content compelling and user driven or is it just a bunch of company mumbo jumbo and ego?

If you haven't already, now is the time to launch a company blog (or up the number of posts you have going live each week.) Onsite SEO and link building are crucial to long term SEO success, but content is really what is going to propel your brand forward. The more quality content you have built around your website the better you look in the eyes of the search engines. It gives your customers a reason to interact with your brand (and link to your site!), builds your online authority and helps grow your overall online presence.

5). Imagine There are no Search Engines

Speaking of overall online presences (and this is going to sound strange coming from an SEO professional), treat your online marketing like there were no search engines. It's important to diversify your traffic sources so your entire online livelihood isn't based on the mercy of the search engines. If Google didn't exist, what other online activities would you invest into connect with your audience? Build up these other channels so that if your site is impacted by an update, you can survive until you figure out and fix the problem. Google doesn't owe you anything, and even though they want site owners to do a good job with their SEO (it helps clean up the SERPs, which gives Google a better product) they aren't obligated to make sure your site survives. It's up to you to learn the rules of the online world and give your website the best chance at online success.

There are many, many things a site owner could so with their SEO that could trigger a penalty from Google. But these are 5 things a site owner can (and should) do to not only protect their sites from future updates, but actually benefit from them. 

Useful Tips for Small Business Owners

Leadership is important in your business whether you have 1 employee or over 50 employees. Hopefully, these tips will help you on how to be a good leader for your business if you are not already. All of these tips can't be done just once, you need to practice them daily or weekly or monthly. Repetition of each task will get you in a routine and make your business run smoother. Being a small business owner can be rewarding in many ways but can be frustrating as well.

1). Work on your Business, Not in It

This actually sounds pretty ridiculous because you should know how to do the majority of aspects in your business. This means that you need to focus on your future plan and how your business is going to move forward and grow. You are the mastermind of starting your business. You can't stop thinking and growing just because you are now open.

Sometimes it is a lot easier to focus on the day-to-day operations of your business because I am sure you know it best, but you are not helping your business this way. Why do you hire staff if you are just going to let them sit on their backsides and play games on their phones all day! You need to work on your five and ten-year plans and what steps you need to do to get there.

By working your business and not in it, your business will eventually be able to run itself. As an owner, you need to be able to take a vacation or if you need to leave for an emergency and not have to worry about whether the business will run itself or fall apart without you.

You should be able to leave at any given time and your business should sail smooth. It is very gratifying as an owner to not worry about your business when you are not around. It means you have done your job and have led your employees to be efficient and independent thinkers.

2). Have a Plan and Work It

Now that you know what your future goals are going to be for your business, don't forget about the actual business. I know I said don't focus on the day to day operations but it is important to find out how each department in your business is doing. Check on the inventory and assess your business on a regular basis.

Work this into your short-term goals. Don't let the business slip out from under your fingers because you were looking at your long-term goals. At the same though, don't micromanage every little detail. Practice your plan and make it work.

3). Find a Mentor

Find someone you trust, is patient and who has success in a similar business as yours. You need to be able to bounce off ideas or call them with questions. I'm glad my mentor was patient. There would be times when I would call my mentor five or more times a day and even at all hours of the night.

I wouldn't go this far if I was you, but I had a great relationship with mine. After getting scolded for waking her up, she was more than helpful. The trick to finding a good mentor is finding one that wants you to succeed. This makes all the difference in the world.

4). Keep an Eye on the Future

We briefly talked about long-term goals. I always told myself to look for the light at the end of the tunnel during hard days or think about that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This is important as well because there will be frustrating and long days. Remember why you started the business in the first place and to look forward to brighter days. If you have this attitude you will have more light days than darker ones.

A positive attitude is crucial in succeeding in your business. There would be days when I would have 20 clients needing my attention all at once. Remembering why I was in the business and what my goals were helped me get through the day and focus on my future. Thomas Fuller said "All things are difficult before they are easy." That is definitely true.

You may start promoting your business online by creating a website and following search engine optimization tips and techniques, or you can contact me for affordable SEO services at your door step.

5). Honesty and Integrity

I cannot stress enough how important honesty and integrity is in the business world. I know we have all heard word of mouth is the best advertisement. Well, not if it is negative. If you say you are going to deliver your product at a certain day and time, then do it.

Unfortunately, life happens and sometimes you can't make your deadline. That usually isn't a problem if you are honest with your customer. Tell them why you cannot make the deadline. They will appreciate your honesty even though it was not when you initially told them, but they will more than likely return to your business because you treated them with integrity.

They go hand in hand and can go a long way in your business. This doesn't sound like it would be hard to practice being honest but if you've helped someone learn the piano, then you know that paying attention to detail and communicating with your customers takes the same effort, it's just like learning to read music for the piano. Consistent practice is very important.

6). Pay Yourself

For heavens sake, pay yourself! I cannot stress this enough. We all go into business to make money, right? Well, how are you going to make money if you aren't paying yourself? It will become harder and harder to stay positive when you aren't paying yourself. There would be months when I wouldn't pay myself because I always needed something else for the business. You are always going to need something new. Make it wait and pay yourself.

I mentioned earlier about practicing these tips and how it is similar to learning to play an instrument. When you are learning to play an instrument you practice the movements and notes in a slow and methodical manner to make sure you are practicing it correctly.

Practicing all of these leadership tips is very similar. Imagine learning to play the piano and you have to practice every day. Eventually you will be able to play with speed from all of the repetition, just like you will be able to run your business much smoother because you have practiced every day. It is very essential to start promoting your business online by creating a website and following search engine optimization tips and techniques, or contact me for SEO solutions to small businesses at your door step.

SEO Tips for Small Business Website Owners

Many business owners understand the importance of their site ranking well on Google and the other search engines, but for many search engine optimization (SEO) remains a mystery. Here we are sharing some SEO tips for small or medium business owner can understand easily.

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of making your website popular by showing in search engines result pages when someone using a search term or keywords relevant to your business.  It can provide a great source of traffic for your website and build new customers and clients for your business without investing any thing. 

Some helpful SEO tips for small business website owners are as follows:
 
1). Do a Proper Business Related Keyword Analysis:

Choose proper keywords for your business website with a proper keyword analysis to represent worldwide through internet. Search the most relevant words and phrases explaining about your business services, products or other benefits you providing for your customers. Make a rough list of these words to use them writing content for your website. The most relevant keywords should be used in Meta elements (Title, Keyword, heading and description) of the website. 

 

2). Page Title is most Important:

Keep the page titles short and focused on the keyword rich content. Avoid putting your company name in your page title. If someone searches for your company name, they will definitely find your website. But if someone search for keywords related to your business, then he unable to find your company in search terms, and you ultimately loose a customer. Search engines give very high importance to the page title.

Also, having your company name repeat over many pages can negatively affect the behavior of search bots. It may seem like duplication. The page title holds a lot of weight with search engines. Don’t waste that power!

3). Add Quality Content:

Add most relevant, high quality and unique content describing your business services and products. You want to get about 10-30 pages of new content a month and get this content linked to. If you write scholarly papers, you can get yourself linked to by .edu and high PR sites, which will sharply boost your site. Finally, by honing in your articles on specific keywords, you can target new areas and reap niche searches. 

Remember, niche searches – as a group – are usually worth more than the major terms. This is for two reasons: a niche search indicates that the searcher is relatively more sophisticated. He or she knows what they want. They tend to buy product at higher rates. Secondly, around half of all searches are 2 or 3 words. Considering the vast amount of possibilities this creates, there is a world of marketing opportunity. 

A spin on this is adding articles to other sites. While it may be hard to create an interesting article based on your subject, if you do so, and make it snappy, you may get some Digg or del.ico.ous love.

Also, many of the midrange keywords are not heavily contested. A lot of websites still think that a good search engine strategy is just repeating keywords, something that was true in the early years of 2000. Worst of all, because they may have OK search engine results, they may be complacent. 

Often their good results come from a lack of competition, and an adept campaign can eat away at their share. 

4). Beware Grand Promises:

SEOs who promise to submit your site to thousands of search engines are misleading you. There are only a few major search engines, the top three of which are Google, MSN, and Yahoo for the US. For marketing in Asia and Europe, other engines hold reign, but again with a few industry leaders. The top search engines of every single country put together would be far less than 100. 

There may be some special cases where your content is very, very specific, and you’d want to target quite selectively. In that case, submission to a specialized search engine would be fine. But in general, a promise to submit your website to thousands of search engines is meaningless. After submission to thousands of search engines, your website may end up on a link-farm. Even if Google has not already devalued the links from that page, hurting your site, it may do so at will later. 

Legit link building submission techniques are, of course, a component of online marketing. But ignore offers that sound too good to be true. Know what is happening with your information. 

5). Avoid Black Hat SEO Tricks:

Your competitor is out-ranking you. You check their website out: two things stand out. They have hundreds of keywords stuffed on their page, and they use two titles (repeat the title tag). Thinking this is their key to success; you quickly copy that technique, or request your tech guys to do it for you. 

Don’t try this instead. Use a PR checker tool to evaluate their website. Analyze their backlinks. Most likely you’ll find that their position is not the result of high quality SEO – the competition is simply just doing a worse job.

Using Black Hat techniques to try to trick search engines won’t work in the long run and, in the worst case scenario, will result in your page being removed from the search index entirely. Car giant Mercedes Benz once had their site removed from Google due to such violations.

6). Optimize Images with “alt tag”:

Optimize everything. Google is increasing its use of Universal Search, but is doing so subtly. It’s not hitting you over the head with images in every search. Search for Monet. First you’ll see "Image Results." Search for Bird Flu. First you’ll find a prompt to refine your results, then, scrolling down, perhaps a news entry, then on the bottom images. Images, video, and news articles are now mixed in with regular search results. This is a cutting edge shift, and some laggards have yet to realize its potential. 

You need to have every part of your website optimized. 

What this means is giving images accurate titles. Instead of "02303212.jpg," have "widget-doing-dance.jpg" The better image title has some impact on search engines. Also, make sure to give your images alt text (by simply adding alt = "text-here" in the html that adds the image). This does three things: makes your website accessible to people who can’t see your image and helps your search engine rankings.

Your alt text should be pertinent, add mood, and if possible contain keywords.

7). Update Alternate URLs by Redirecting:

Search engines like Google treats http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com, as two different URLs. These two URLs are treated as separate websites, and can confuse Search Engines. 

In the worst case scenario, the Search Engine flags the two different pages as being duplicates of one another. Being flagged as duplicate material will, at the least, hurt your rating. At worst, it’ll send your site to the Supplemental index, which is like a garbage dump for websites.

To fix this problem, use this .htaccess code: (without the >>>:)
>>>: Options +FollowSymLinks
>>>: RewriteEngine on
>>>: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
>>>: RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301] 

This will redirect the http://yoursite.com to http://www.yoursite.com. The opposite can be done to redirect http://www.yoursite.com to http://yoursite.com, if so desired. 

8). Use Wikipedia:

Write a Wikipedia article if your website is big enough. If not, keep pumping out the content until it is. Although Wikipedia itself will not add much to your ranking, it is almost a search engine in and of itself. If and when a potential client/customer wants to look up your information, many times they’ll just plug it into Wikipedia and see what pops out. Also, many other websites copy the Wikipedia information, and those links to your website may add value. 

In writing your Wikipedia article, make sure to be balanced. In general, try to create some conflict or story. Give free product to less well-off people. Start a scholarship. Find a celebrity to siphon attention from.

9). Use YouTube and others Video Sources:

Create a YouTube video. Consumers are very good at figuring out what is an ad and what isn’t, at least in the conventional sense. Online videos, however, can easily slip under the radar as long as they are entertaining. Take advantage of this by creating a few videos that deal with whatever it is you do. 

Make the videos funny. Make them good-sized but not too long. Make sure to include a URL in the video itself. You may make some more sales and increase awareness about your business website.

10). Use Social Networking Media:

Use social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc. for creating social awareness about your website and business. Share knowledge, tips and latest news by creating friends. Update your profile with relevant information. Currently social networks are major source of visitors. 

Make it very easy for your users to spread the word. Include "Tell a friend" functionality where and whenever possible. Also make sure to make it really, really simple. Everyone likes it when something works without too much thinking.

Another form of this is to add Social Bookmarking (SB) capability. SB is relatively new by real world standards and old stuff by internet standards – what it is, basically, is sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and others, that let users compile their website preferences with others. You want to make it easy for you users to bookmark you.

In addition to spreading the word, Social Bookmarks have tremendous influence on Search Engines. Expert SEOs have recently done experiments where, by using the power of Social Bookmarking, they were able to gain top ten positions for very, very competitive search terms.