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A Checklist for Small Business SEO

Written by: Daria Goetsch

Article Overview: Checklist of common sense steps for search engineoptimization of your small business website.

A Checklist for Small Business SEO

Small businesses are finding it more difficult to compete in the ever growing competitive market online during this economic crisis. Web developers may find the marketing aspect of their job time consuming. Educating your client is a key element, whether providing search engine marketing services yourself or referring a client to a search engine marketing company. When small budgets limit small businesses, the small business owner must work smarter and think carefully before starting a search engine marketing program.

The search engines serve the search engine user. What works for the search engine user generally works for the search engines' guidelines in terms of optimization and marketing of the website. As the search engine leader, Google makes it clear they want to provide the best search results for their users. Think like a search engine user when beginning your search engine marketing campaign.


Understand your website goals

*Who are your top competitors? Learn as much about them as possible. If they are gaining more sales and traffic than you are, find out what they are doing and replicate it.

*Who is your target audience? Who do you want to buy your products or read your website information? Who is your competitor's target audience?

*What are you trying to achieve with your website? Sales for products, visitors to read website information, creating a community of website users to click on PPC ads/AdSense ads, creating an authority site on a topic? Decide what your goal is for your website.

*What keyword terms would a search engine user use to find your website? What are familiar keyword terms your industry would use to find your website?

*Search on your keyword list in Google to see how competitive your keyword phrases are. Searches from one to five million search results can be thought of as moderately competitive.


Gain pre-qualified, targeted search engine traffic

*Create individualized title, meta description, ALT attribute and heading tags for each web page reflecting the content of the individual web page. Keyword tags are optional; this tag is still used by Yahoo's search engine.

*Use your important keyword phrases sparingly throughout each web page. Make sure the text makes sense for the website visitor when including keywords in the text of the page. Use your most important keyword phrases near the top of the web page.

*Use two and three word keyword phrases to target qualified traffic for your website. Search engine users generally use two or three word keywords in searches to find what they are looking for online. The more specific you are (long tail keyword phrases), the more targeted/narrow the search results will be for the phrase.

*Focus on keyword phrases for specific pages reflecting the content of the web page.

*Create link popularity using an ongoing one-way link building campaign for free and paid social networking profiles, human edited directory listings, blog reviews, blog directory listings, business associations and industry association websites.

*Create a sitemap for optimum indexing of web pages on the website.

*Create a blog as part of the website to add continuing new information to the website. Blog pages are indexed quickly by the search engines.

*Sign up for free Google Analytics/Google Webmaster Tools account and a Yahoo Site Explorer account. These free tools provide free traffic information, page indexing information and valuable link building information.

*Upload an XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo and MSN Live search engines for optimum indexing by the search engines.

*Use free and paid online tools to help you evaluate and gain information about your competitors and your keyword list. Use software tools as a guideline for information you are collecting.


Small businesses are up against an increasingly difficult road in this current economy to compete with larger businesses who can afford to pay more for their search engine marketing success. Following these initial steps will help provide campaign information and basic search engine marketing necessary to start your search engine marketing program.

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Article Tags: competitive market, crisis web, economic crisis, google, keyword list, keyword phrases, marketing campaign, marketing program, meta description, search engine marketing, search engine marketing company, search engine marketing services, search engine traffic, small business owner, target audience, targeted search, web developers, website goals, website search, website users



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