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 …

I spoke at a local Chamber of Commerce here in the Portland area last week, giving a brief presentation on the fundamentals of SEO. Unlike a previous event I’d attended just three months ago in eastern Washington, about 75% of this audience had actually heard the term “SEO” before.
But after my brief synopsis on local search, I still received a couple of questions from the audience related to “claiming your listing” and what that was all about. It seems that even in incredibly savvy small business markets like the …

We enlisted e-commerce experts to help a bricks-and-mortar retailer make the transition online.
Dear CNNMoney.com: I have owned and operated a retail storefront for the past three years. I recently launched an online e-commerce Web site. I have paid an SEO guy each month and have aggressively marketed the site, but I’m only getting one sale a month. I am losing faith in all of the work, time and effort that has been put in. Do you have any suggestions on how to jumpstart the e-commerce portion of my business?
- Joanne …

When using Web analytics, it’s easy to get caught up in all the numbers and statistics and lose sight of the overall goal — getting the intelligence you need to make effective adjustments to your Web site and online marketing strategies to increase the ROI your site delivers. It doesn’t do any good to use Web analytics to produce cool charts and reports but then fail to make adjustments to improve your site’s performance!
To illustrate how Web analytics can be used to make decisions to improve the effectiveness of an …

…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.

Most Internet surfers are constantly subjected to a barrage of promotional messages and advertising. As a basic defense mechanism, they tune out most hype. Perhaps you have to be somewhat crass to get them to your landing page.
Once visitors end up on your landing page, stop screaming at them. You’re no longer competing for their attention with other Web sites, so change the focus to the task they’re trying to accomplish.
Your visitors detest marketese. Unfortunately, your landing page was probably written in this kind of over-the-top promotional style. …read more …

“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 …