Okay, so say you’re a small business looking for search on a dime. You have your domain, your hosting is squared away, you have a few pages of content up and you’re finally ready to attract the world (or at least your city) to your Web site. Being small means you need to be smarter. It’s about doing all the little things that will pack the big rewards. Where do you start?

In the past, local advertising was the best way to reach new customers for if you have a business offering local goods and services. Yellow pages, local newspapers, door-to-door flyers, coupons and promotions and word-of-mouth do still generate phone calls and storefront traffic. But today consumers are increasingly using the Internet as their primary source of local business information. Having your business presented at the top of search engine results and in local directories is now a critical part of any local marketing plan.

It’s about being there and being found (less about SEO)
For consumers, local search is about finding things we want (need) that are tangible and near by. It’s not about finding sites spread across the vast open web that have the best SEO, the most inbound links, and the highest Google page rank.
Local search is impatient. It’s directional in nature. It’s not exploratory. It’s more about the physical facts, and less about qualitative information.
Therefore, for small business owners, local search is about being there and being found …

…a mix of some of the most popular and comprehensive search marketing tools that both Best Rank and other 3rd party websites offer. Each tool is organized into logical sections so that you can understand each main section at a time:
via SEO Tools – Search Engine Optimization – PPC – Keyword Research | Best Rank.

“Virtually everyone who’s engaged seriously in the practice of search engine optimization has found it to have surprisingly versatile results. Site owners will often start out optimizing in order to rank for a particular term/phrase that’s relevant to getting customers, only to find that secondary and tertiary benefits from branding to reputation management to raw traffic all have an impact. Today I’d like to cover the different applications of SEO and talk about how to choose the right SEO objectives for your business.” …more on SEOMoz. Photo credit: RellyAB

Yesterday I posted “3 Reasons Why Blog SEO Fails” to help readers avoid the pitfalls of starting a business or corporate blog purely for SEO reasons only to end up wasting time and energy. Without proper planning, oversight and passion for the topic, blogs implemented purely for SEO objectives are doomed to fail. Additionally, social media referrals and recommendations are becoming a notable competitor to search traffic which can place SEO as a secondary promotional effort in some situations.
Here are five tips for successful business blog optimization benefits in …

Link Building… Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it’s still the trump card for higher rankings.
Many of us have been hoping that it would go away. In Brett Tabke’s 5/18 Robots.txt entry, he echoed a sentiment that many, many webmasters hold on to as a hope:
What happens to all those Wavers that think Getting Links = SEO when that majority of the Google algo is devalued in various ways? Wavers built their fortunes on “links=seo”. When that goes away, the Wavers have zero …