Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 101 For Small Business Owners
June 5, 2012 by Lisa Santos · 1 Comment

Search Engine Optimization
Some business owners shy away from SEO thinking it’s some huge monster that’s going to eat them alive. However, SEO is something that can help them generate more leads, customers, and sales for a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising methods.
SEO is a process of optimizing a website to improve search engine rankings.
In a nutshell, this is the process of getting traffic to your website.
This is achieved through “on-site optimization” and “off-site optimization.”
On-site optimization should include the keywords that your business would like to rank for as well as a few other key components.
Keyword research is the most crucial part of the SEO process because the keywords you target mean everything. Get it right and you will see major results!! Get it wrong and it will be a waste of time, energy and money.
You can do keyword research in the Google Keyword Tool. Simply enter your main keywords into the tool and review the results.
The results will show what keywords people are searching for and how many times each keyword is searched for each month. This is powerful information for you because now you know what keywords to target in your SEO campaign.
Off-site optimization involves getting relevant backlinks to your website as well as establishing a strong presence spread out all over the Internet. This includes articles, press releases, videos, Facebook, Twitter, and any site other than yours. The more you have out there, the better. All of these sources will contain a link back to your website will help your website rank higher in the search engines as well as giving you stronger online visibility.
You can even create a network of “mini-sites” for your business that targets different keywords and link back to your main website.
SEO is one of the most important ways to improve your profits while reducing your advertising costs. While you can try to do SEO yourself, most businesses opt to hire a professional SEO firm to help them achieve faster results.
Whether you do it yourself or hire a professional like us, remember that your goal is to have a high-ranking site in the search engines. SEO is the key to online success!
Effectively Generate Backlinks and Traffic with Squidoo and Hubpages
August 30, 2010 by Lisa Santos · 7 Comments
Social marketing, involves both interacting and engaging with your target audience, as well as setting up individual webpages on communities like Squidoo and HubPages.com.
Squidoo is an exceptionally popular service that allows users to create one-page websites referred to as ‘lenses’.
With Squidoo being an authority website with search engines like Google, each time you build a lens, you are able to rank for specific keywords used within your page’s title and content itself. It’s a very effective strategy for generating back links and generating traffic to your website.
Squidoo also offers additional modules that you can integrate into your lens pages, including the option to incorporate an opt-in form into your page, so that you can begin to develop an email list of prospects.
You can also earn money from within the Squidoo community based on affiliate commissions generated from the different modules and add-ons that you inject into your lense pages, including Amazon modules, and Adsense.
Another similar service that allows you to develop one-page websites that rank heavily within the search engines is available at www.Hubpages.com
With Hub Pages, you can also earn revenue from different add ons that you decide to implement, but are also able to add tags to your hub pages for better ranking within the search engine.
With Hub Pages, there are a few restrictions in place that you need to pay attention to, including:
- You are only permitted to feature two external (outgoing) links on each hub that you create.
- Your content must be unique, (no PLR is permitted).
- You are not permitted to use excessive tags.
As long as you focus on developing high quality hub pages, you can benefit from the popularity of the Hub community, as well as the back links from each hub page that you create.
Make sure when you create external pages on websites like Hub Pages or Squidoo that you interlink your pages to your main website’s URL.
By cross linking from feeder sites to your main landing page, you will be able to develop a solid back link campaign, quickly and at absolutely no cost. This is also a very effective method of ensuring your website is indexed by the major search engines, VERY quickly!
There are other free methods of building back links and maximizing your exposure online, including by developing a quick blog on http://www.Wordpress.org and http://www.Blogger.com
Both of these services also carry weight within the search engines, which means that you will be able to increase your outreach just by spending a few minutes developing a single page website that showcases your main website, or your products and services.
Blogger is a great place to make feeder sites. It’s a free blogging platform run by Google, and pages there can often rank very well in many search engines.
Pages on Blogger aren’t given special ranking privileges by Google simply because they run the site.
But like Squidoo, HubPages, and other similar sites, they have enough pages with backlinks and authority that the overall site seems to get a nice boost.
If you’re going to make a blog to promote your membership site, there are two ways to go about it.
You could either set up a little throwaway blog that you only post a few articles on, linking to your site in each article, or you could try to create an authority blog.
An authority blog is one that you post to fairly regularly, work towards getting a lot of regular viewers, and try to get “authority” status in the search engines.
If you want to create an authority blog, it will be a lot more effective. Your readers will come to respect you as a real expert in your field, so they will be more inclined to join your membership site.
It’s a great way to get members, just keep in mind that running an authority blog requires a substantial commitment. You have to post regularly, or it won’t be very effective.
As with other feeder sites, you’ll want to use your keyword you can. If you can get your keyword in the URL, it’s a very good idea to do so.
If you just want to create quick throwaway blogs for fast search engine traffic, you don’t necessarily have to use unique content.
To the best of my knowledge, Blogger doesn’t have any requirements that say you can’t use PLR, so this is a good way to build feeder sites quickly.
If you want to become an authority blog, I wouldn’t use PLR. Unique content is a much better idea, even though it takes more time.
By cross linking from remotely hosted pages to your own main site, you will be able to develop a solid back link campaign, quickly and at absolutely no cost. This is also a very effective method of ensuring your website is indexed.
Generating Relevant Back Links Through Article Marketing
August 3, 2010 by Lisa Santos · 3 Comments
Article marketing is one of the most popular methods of generating relevant back links from authority websites, and in maximizing your outreach with well-crafted, high quality content directed at your target audience.
Each article should be between 300 and 600 words in length and provide useful information that your target audience would find appealing.
The greater the number of articles in circulation, the more exposure you will receive, however you always want to focus on producing high quality content, rather than just on the quantity that is being distributed between these networks.
Apart from directly benefiting from the exposure received by having your articles showcased within popular article directories such as www.EzineArticles.com, you will also benefit from the frequency in which search engines crawl article directories due to new content being posted each day.
Here are the top article directories that you should focus on submitting content to:
http://www.ArticlesFactory.com
http://www.ArticleDashboard.com
http://www.ArticleFriendly.com
