Small Business SEO Basics - Optimization for Start-Ups & One Man Businesses

Much has been written on the internet about "small business seo" but it's usually the same old "SEO basics" advice you see everywhere, so the aim of this hub is to address the simplest "actionables" that need to be done, and then allow the small business owner to get on with their actual business instead of worrying about having to actually learn SEO themselves.

So let's assume you don't even know what SEO is until coming across this article. You just lost your job a little while ago, and decided to take the opportunity to go into business for yourself, doing something you like doing and have always wanted to do.

The business has other input channels other than the web, which are ticking along but you have heard of and understand the power of the internet, so just have gotten yourself a new website from a local designer, but a couple of weeks later and can't find it in Google anywhere, and only then somebody asked you about the site's "SEO" ?

Unfortunately, it's true, for whilst it's a fact that a website built around the SEO goals will always perform better than a site built with no consideration and optimized afterwards, only a tiny percentage of new site owners have thought seriously about SEO before the build.

Sometimes the web designers will have assured you that they "know SEO" and that "all the meta tags will be optimized", and knowing no better you took that to mean that it's SEO is all sorted then, and very often the designers will just stay right off the subject altogether.

So.. ..er.. what is SEO then?

As in optimizing your website for search engines, so they like it better, and rank you higher. It is (or can be) a hugely voluminous and complicated subject if you want it to, or it can actually be pretty simple if you decide that's how you're going to look at it, and in this hub that is exactly how we are going to look at it.

SEOs & Companies Usually Make It Sound More Complicated Than It Is

It's true, partly through inability to explain clearly and concisely, and probably partly due to justifying their job and fee, many SEOs seriously over-complicate what is actually a fairly simple process for most small businesses and their websites.

This is not to say that there are not many levels of SEO and it is true that you can always be doing better, but at base beginner level the 80/20 rule is in firm effect, and you will see the 80% available improvement for 20% of the total work required, so we're just going to focus on the first 20% here and leave the other 80% for further down the line.

At very broad overview level, there are only really 3 parts to SEO:

1. keyword Research
2. Onsite (coding) alignment to suit target keywords (from research)
3. Get inbound links

Pretty simple huh? ..Obviously, each of these areas is potentially a massive over-simplification, rather like saying: "just change the engine on the car"

But for many small businesses, it's really not that complicated, after all, if all you need is to be visible for a local "bricks and mortar" service, lets say as an example, " Fort Worth - Janitorial" company, then there are several basic steps you can take, that given a little time will get you visible, and in the meantime you can forget about SEO and get on with your core business.

Lets assume for the sake of this hub, that you have (as many do) the standard sort of small business website, 5-10 pages including this kind of thing:

• home- splash-page
  
• about-us/ who-we-are
• what-we-do
• picture-gallery
• contact-us

You need to "realign" this with the keywords that your users are going to be searching for, we don't need to actually change the page filenames, only theme the pages correctly. In general the homepage, or main domain address, is usually the strongest page on a site, and will always be involved in your SEO strategy.

You then need to identify the other important "theme" pages, and these are any pages that contain differing and unique written content about your or your marketplace. You really do not need to worry about optimizing "contact-us" picture galleries and the like, only pages that could rank for terms in their text content that your customers might be typing.

So the example above, we would drop the last two pages, and run with the first four pages, and if you're not following by now, try answering the question the pagename implies, ie

1. home - summary / overview of the rest of the site.
   
2. who-we-are - well who are we? - a janitorial cleaning company in Fort Worth.
3. what-we-do? - provide the best cleaning service available in FW at competitive rates

So now we have an idea of the "alignment" of the site, lets find ourt what the right words to align it to are, and make sure we cover it all.

There are all kinds of SEO & Keyword research tools available on the web, but at utter basics level that's too complicated already, and in many cases all you have to do at entry level is copy the best of your competitors, and a bit of brain-storming with friends and colleagues to make sure you haven't missed anything, that maybe your competitors might have (immediate win available)

In the example case above, janitorial service/s + FW (Fort Worth),  commercial cleaning + FW and Office cleaning + FW just about covers it, and all of that can easily be discovered by just looking at what else people already there are targeting.

Ok, so we've got a few basic keywords plus local modifiers, lets move on..

If you have a Wordpress website, or a CMS that allows you to change your site's pagetitles, this is a cinch, just log in and type in new descriptive titles that read well, with your target keywords or phrases used once each, like:

Janitorial Services - Commercial & Office Cleaning Service in Fort Worth.

If your site is in HTML or not accessible for you to get at, this might be slightly more tricky, and may possibly require getting the developer to do it, and will take him approximately 30 seconds, or if you are OK with FTP and editing software, Dreamweaver etc, just do it yourself.

The code you are looking for is in the <head> tag and will start like this:

<title> Likely Just the domain name </title>

Just cut out the old title, type in your new one, save the page and upload it over the old version. While you are there, you may as well do the description meta tag, summarize the content of the page in a "call to action" type message of around 10-12 words, the tag should look like:

<meta name="description" content="blah blah">

replace the blahs with your new carefully crafted descriptions, mentioning the keywords again, once, but only if natural writing allows, example:

"XXXX Cleaning proudly providing commercial and office janitorial services to Fort Worth customers since 1980, call us today for a free quote."

Do this for all your important pages, then close the editors and forget all about coding, the onsite basics are now covered for the time-being.

Ok, so this is the biggest over-simplification in the world, because the Art of Linkbuilding could take a lifetime to master all the many different aspects, but there are several easy things you can do to help yourself get going, and in many small business search niches may even be enough.

1. Start an offsite blog, publish different but related content, linking occasionally to your site
2. Join and partake in several relevant forums, set up your profile link and signature links once you are allowed to.
   
3. Join Hubpages and publish articles with links to your site
4. Email all your friends and associates with sites or blogs and ask for a link
5. Submit your site to any relevant local business directories
6. Consider a yahoo directory link ($300)

If you do all of the above, with a little success in each area, you will likely find that you are well on your way to ranking where you need to. You may then wish or need to think about employing a consultant or company to engage in higher level linkbuilding on your behalf, or you may even just find that you don't need to.