Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical when it comes to running your own business on the internet. One of your main objectives as a blogger or a webmaster should be to increase as much traffic flow to your website as possible. There is a greater chance of owning and operating a successful business and website with more publicity your content receives from the amplified traffic.

Here are some helpful SEO suggestions that you might want to try out!

Original Content

Ok, this might seem like it is an obvious tip that you have already picked up on. But, there are so many reasons why it is imperative to have your own quality and unique content up on your site. It may take a lot of research and time, but in the end it will all be worth it.

When you do research and spend time keeping yourself updated on the latest websites it may help to fuel your own fire and give you new ideas, which is so important because people do not want to read the same content that they saw on someone else’s blog, or see the same material that is on another site.

Furthermore, search engines are looking for unique content.  Bing, Google … you name it – they’re all crawling for unique content.

Keep your material unique and flavorful. Hopefully this will make it resonate with your site visitors and search engine crawlers, resulting in greater rankings for your website.

Keeping Up

One of the worst things you can do is let your own website fall behind because it has old content that no one is interested in anymore.

As a blogger, you should make sure that you keep yourself updated with current news. If anything, as a blogger, it is important to be one step ahead of the game and get brand new information before anyone is aware of it or has published it.

This also is true if you have a website for your company. It is good to ensure to your visitors and customers that you are up to date with current technologies that they are searching for. Stay on your toes and work hard to provide your site visitors with fresh information and that will be a sure way to gain traffic for your website.

Just make sure not to slack off; the internet and technology are constantly changing, so just because you may want to take a break, think again!

Social Media Marketing

Now, more than ever it is very important that you are participating in social media marketing. Almost everyone has hopped onto the social media craze whether it is via Twitter, Facebook, etc. So it is important for your blog or business that you stay connected with the community. Social media is a great and simple way to bring in more traffic.

Google has also introduced Google Real Time Search, which is very useful when it comes to SEO. The way that it works is when something is typed into a Google Search the results that appear feature the most current Tweets and messages about a topic. The search results also contain links from sites such as Twitter, which encourages the visitors to interact with your website.

So the more that you participate on social media websites, the better it is to bring in traffic to your own page.

Hopefully these tips are useful to your blog or your business. Let us know if you have any insight on what could boost SEO.

In todays technological world, small business owners are beginning to fall behind. Here are the top 10 small business online marketing mistakes.

1. Domain Name! The most COMMON mistake is the companies URL! Most small business owners who do not consult a marketing consultant and end up choosing a very long url. Such as thisismyurlandyouwillneverrememberit.com. The shorter your URL the better! Having keywords in your URL is a very imperative thing as well. So you need to consult someone to find out what the best mix is. A URL means everything and can truly be the difference between making your website work or not.
2. Cheap Marketing! While it may be tempting to use your husbands friend’s kid to do your site cheap and dirty, I would stop and rethink that. Most business owners do not have the money to seek the expensive experts, which is understandable. However, again, your website is your store front, your MAIN piece of advertisement, your bread and butter. You NEED to make sure your website is unique, professional, and relays the correct message. By hiring someone cheap, whether a company or freelancer, 9/10 times you walk away with something you think is great, but ask a professional and they will probably think otherwise. A website can LOOK pretty (or look really bad) and still NOT give your customers the correct message, in return decreasing your conversion rate.
3. Only Paper Ads! There’s a large portion of small business owners who are still into the news paper ads and old school advertising (or not advertising at all!). BIG mistake. Those types of advertising are fine, however you need to also explore the web since that’s the first place people go now a days.
4. I Don’t Need a Website! Than you have the “I don’t need a website” population. These are the people who believe that they don’t need a website because either their business is doing well without it or they think that in their industry people don’t use the web to find people. First off, I don’t care what industry you are in! People STILL search the web! If anyone can tell me otherwise, please tell me! Also remember, always save for a rainy day. It’s better to be over busy than not busy at all. If you get busy HIRE people! Don’t not advertise if you have the income to spend it. Getting set up on the web takes time so if your business takes a nose dive you will not have a quick way or the money to get your website to the point where it will sell itself.
5. Templates! Another situation that occurs is when people go to one of those cheap $30/month sites like Vista Print and put up a template. The issue with that is, if they are selling you that template they can be selling that to EVERYONE. You want to be unique, not the same as Joe down the road.
6. No SEO! Most owners put up a website without actually utilizing it. It’s great to have a website up, but if your not getting traffic to your site, it’s pointless! It’s like having a store and not telling anyone it’s there. You can find an SEO company for $400.00/month. It may seem worthless in the beginning, but trust me, you are probably getting more business and you don’t even know it. You don’t need to ask every customer, “where did you find me?”, but I guarantee that if you did you’d be surprised how many say “the web”.
7. Coming Soon: I’m like the neighborhood watch dog. I am always scouting out what all the local company websites are doing just to be curious. You’d be surprised how many actually have “coming soon” for days, weeks, and months. Than if they get their site up, half the pages say “coming soon”. Don’t publish an incomplete website! If it’s not complete, finish it, than publish it. If you are building a new page, don’t display it until it’s complete. If you want to tell people you are putting a new page to get the buzz going, create a section on the homepage, put it in the news section, or blog about it!
8. Boring! One thing that people do that really urk’s me is how people put up their website and than don’t update it for MONTHS. Believe it or not, it really does make a difference! By not putting anything new on your website you aren’t giving people a reason to come back. By publishing new content you are not only giving the search engines another reason to come spider your site, getting new potential users with new keywords, but you are also giving your current customers a reason to come back to your site.
9. Browser Check: I can’t tell you how many sites (even BIG companies!) I have seen that look great in one browser  but awful in another. It doesn’t always have to look 100% identical, but make sure it at least looks good! This is another reason why hiring a cheap designer will not do a small business any justice. To master IE 6,7,8,9 Firefiox 2,3,4, Chrome, Safari 2,3,4, and now the mobile web is a talent!
10. Web Hosting: One major issue people have is that they always choose the cheap or free hosting. This is not the right solution! The reason is because most of the time these cheap hosting companies have a reason why they are cheap. I have had clients sites go down and than ask me, “why is my site down”. And my answer is “you chose a cheap hosting company”.

So to be honest I could probably come up with 5-10 more mistakes small business owners make when creating their online presence. But I think you all get the point. The moral of the story is you get what you pay for!

I’ve recently have had a few people ask me, “Why am I in Google, but not in Yahoo or Bing?”. Even though Google is perceived as the “toughest” search engine to get ranked in, it actually isn’t true. Each search engine has it’s own search engine algorithm that determines it’s own unique results. Some people “accuse” Bing of stealing Google’s algorithm, however there are so few people who actually KNOW what Google’s algorithm is, so I completely think that’s false.

What is Yahoo’s & Bing’s Deal?

For one, Yahoo tends to like spam links and considers both nofollow and dofollow links, where Google tend to get rid of a lot of spam sites and only considers dofollow links. So to get to the top in Yahoo tends to be harder because now you have to not only beat the real sites, but the spam sites that just post their links everywhere under the sun. So in order to get into Google you need to have a low amount of spam links and a high amount of good follow links. But to get into Yahoo you just have to be the master link site for that keyword. In order words to get both you need a lot of GOOD and quality links. Now, that’s not fun is it? Now Yahoo and Bing both relies heavily on onsite SEO. Onsite SEO is optimizing your site for search engines. So your title tags, meta tags (Even though this isn’t really relevant anymore), description tags, header tags, content, etc. So Yahoo tends to favor sites who are keyword heavy on their page, but the downside of this is that Google doesn’t like TOO much on-page because they want it to look natural and not Spammy. So in other words Yahoo likes keyword stuffing, which is like the first thing we learned NOT to do in SEO Class 101! This is what makes our jobs so difficult!

Recommendations to get ranked in Yahoo or Bing

This is how I look at it. If you get yourself in Google and not in Yahoo or Bing, than I actually think your doing something right. That means your doing White Hat SEO instead of just spamming the crap out of your site. So pat yourself on the back, this is a GOOD problem. For all of the people who have the opposite problem, you or your marketing company are probably spamming your site. If you are really having difficulty getting in Yahoo, I’d recommend keep pushing the quality links. If you are ranking in Google, than you are on your way to success. It takes a FULL 6 months of SEO to fully get ranked, doesn’t matter WHAT the keyword is. It can take up to a years worth of work to actually get the full results for the difficult keywords.

Now I spoke a lot about Yahoo, but what about Bing? Now Bing places a lot of emphasis on TEXT and CONTENT, which some people will argue that Google doesn’t. Bing also places a high weighing on relevancy of the content on your site and the keywords you are trying to be ranked for. So make sure your site is ranked highly for LSI Keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing – basically in a nutshell LSI keywords are keywords that aren’t the exact phrase you are using. This will prevent you from over using your main keywords and making your site look like it’s keyword stuffing and spammy). Bing and Google both also look at the domain age. The reason behind this is so that these spam sites that pop up for a one week-one year domain life won’t get higher ranked than a mom and pop shop down the street that’s  had a domain name since 1998.

So what does this mean and how will this help you?

As a business owner you need to think about where you want to spend your money marketing. SEO can easily be done by anyone if they learn it. Just like me, you can go out and read blogs and books and try to figure it out. The best thing I think is to hire a link building/seo company to come in and optimize your site and get you links in the correct places. But remember, don’t just hire anyone because once a page is index, it’s forever indexed!!!