seoforsmallbiz.com

Lets say you want to rank for “Chicago Plumber”. I can easily tell you that there are very large corporations out there with lots of money, doing everything they can to make sure that they rank very well for any city name + “plumber.” Like Yellow pages, online Lead generation companies, national chains with local offices etc. The best way to compete with these companies is usually by letting the search engine know that you are a “local business”. You enter your address and your business name, and you’ll see that Google has a nice reserved spot at the top of the pages for local businesses where the local business that sign up to google and submit their information is shown on a map, with links to their websites and phone numbers.

To sign up in Google, go to here:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Flocal%2Fadd%2FbusinessCenter%3Fgl%3DUS%26hl%3Den-US&service=lbc&hl=en-US&gl=US

Yahoo does not offer this service yet.

MSN: https://llc.local.live.com/BusinessSearch.aspx

Go ahead and register your site. It doesn’t cost you a penny!

Akin Tosyali

This is one of the most critical topics of SEO.  Basically, you need to answer the question; what terms do I want to rank high for? Funiture?  New Tires??

There are 2 levels of complexity behind giving an answer.   First of all, if you pick short or popular terms, it will be very hard to rank well for them.  For example, ranking well for “furniture” or “new tires” will be very tough.  That is because there are literally thousands of sites out there who have been optimizing their site for years, and it would be nearly impossible for a search engine to consider you a more relevant site then these sites.    

The second complexity is, even if you go for a longer term, the chances are there is competition there too.  (this kinda goes back to my earlier point on “Do I need SEO”, earlier you start, it usually is better.

So what you need to do is figure out a)what search terms do not have much competition, and b)what are the terms that really relate to your business, such that your site content could possible be considered to be more relevant than others.

To figure out the level of competition, I suggest using a really simple (and free test).  Typethe search query you have in mind to the search engines adn see what pops up.  If you see bunch of large corporations, it means that this sis a highly competitive term.  If you see your competitors or sites that are not that relevant,  it means that you find the terms that you have a good chance ranking for.

Since you are a business owner and not a developer, I am not going to get into the details here.  Once you have these terms, not you’ll need to make sure that your developer uses these terms often in text in your pages, in your page titles, and even in the image (names) that you will have on your site.

You should create different pages for the different terms you want to rank for, and make sure that those page are only 1 click away from your home page…