St. Thomas SEO

The Key To Small Business SEO

Do you run a small business?

Do you sell only locally?

If you answered yes to both the questions above I am willing to bet that you think you don’t need to have a website and to optimize your website for the search engines.

If you live in a very small community, under 10,000 in population, you are probably right, but if you are in a larger community you might want to re-think this.

The internet is fast becoming the number one resource to find where to buy products, locally and internationally.

This means that if you don’t have a website and don’t turn up in the search engines for your community and your product you are probably loosing sales.

Every small business should have a website of some sort up and running and they should optimize it for the search engines as much as possible.

What’s that you say? You don’t know how to optimize your site for the search engines?

You can always hire a search engine professional like myself to run a full fledge search engine optimization campaign for your site but that would, most likely, prove cost prohibitive for most small businesses. Depending on what you are aiming for the cost would be between $2000 and $5000 per month.

You can do it yourself, with some training.

1. You need to know how to do keyword research to find all the profitable keywords for your site.
2. You need to know how to format your title tag, meta tags and proper use of H tags in your code.
3. You can write content that can be submitted to article distribution sites.
4. You need to know how to set up a geocentric campaign for your website to drive local business.
5. You need to know what content you should have available on your site that is unique to your site only.

Yes you can do this all by yourself but you will spend a lot of time learning how to do it the proper way.

Another solution is to hire a local SEO firm to handle this for you as a small package or quick start package instead of spending months pouring through the information trying to decide which is good and which is bad. Believe me there is a lot more bad information out there than good.

I offer a quick start package for businesses in my local area (St. Thomas, USVI) and there are others that offer it to local businesses and to other businesses that find them on the internet.
I highly recommend that you use a certified search engine optimization expert to handle this for you because the certification means they know at least enough about the topic to pass the test. This will also stop you from getting the guy that has read one of the bad products on search engine optimization and is now a, “SEO expert” from taking your money and damaging your rankings.

Remember: the quick start package I described isn’t a full search engine optimization campaign but it will do wonders in raising your ranking for local searches.

If you are interested in retaining my services you can look them over on the St. Thomas SEO Services page.

You will see a lot of services out there that will submit your site to the search engines for free and then they offer to sell you a service where they submit your site to the search engines every month for X amount of dollars.

The question is should you pay to have your site submitted to the search engines every month?

The answer to this is, only if it is 1999 or 2000. This method helped back in the day but now there is no advantage to submitting to search engines repeatedly. As a matter of fact with the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) if it is done too often your site will actually be flagged for spamming the search engine.

What’s that you say? You aren’t worried about it because the service is submitting your site to thousands of search engines.

Yes, they are submitting to thousands but if you want to get visitors to your site from the search engines there are four you need to concentrate on.

Google – 72% of US Searches in Feb 2009
Yahoo! – 17% of US Searches in Feb 2009
MSN – 5.5% of US Searches in Feb 2009
ASK – 3.7% of US Searches in Feb 2009

Do the math that is 98.2% of all searches done in the US are done on 4 search engine the other 1.8% is divided between thousands of other search engines (actually only about 46 of them made the report). Where do you think you are going to get visitors from?

Just incase you think I made up these numbers you can check them at HitWise

Does this mean that you should not submit to the thousands of search engines that are available?

No go ahead and submit to them if they are indexed you should at least get a backlink from them but I wouldn’t count on too much traffic.

But once you have submitted to a search engine and you are listed there, submitting again IS NOT going to improve your position in the search results, no matter how many times you submit.

For the last five or six years I haven’t even submitted a site to the search engines. The search engines actually prefer to find the links with their spiders that are out scouring the internet. The reason for this is that they assume that a link to a site isn’t an attempt to spam the search engine. When I have a new site I want to get indexed I put a link to the new site on one of my already established sites that I know the search engine spiders visit on a regular basis. This get my new site indexed usually in a day or two, sometimes as fast as an hour (rarely but it has happened).

What do you do if you don’t have an already established site?

In this situation you can create a lens at Squidoo or a page at Hubpages and have a link from there to your new site. This doesn’t work as well as having your own site linking back to you but it does get you indexed in Google in usually less than one week. Remember if you do this don’t create the page (or lens) and only put one link on it back to your site add some content that might be of value to the reader because this page or lens will be there for ever and will reflect your site in some way.

You can also submit to directories and submit articles to get links back to your site. The more links you have, formatted the right way, the better your search engine ranking will be.