Guide to SEO for Small Business Websites

SEO (search engine optimization) can be a daunting task for any website owner, let alone those on a very limited budget such as small businesses. Many small business website owners feel that the top organic spots in Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others are reserved for large corporations with even larger budgets, but this just isn't the case. Getting ranked at the top doesn't need to cost a lot of money, but it does require some hard work and perseverance.

In the next few paragraphs, I'll take you through a real-world case study and great example of a client I recently positioned at the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages) for their most important keyword phrases, and best of all we did it on the cheap.

Case Study - Small Business Website
Like many website owners, the client had a great website but unfortunately noone knew about it due to a total lack of on-page and off-page website optimization. Too much flash content, non-search engine friendly navigation/link structure, and lack of content were all on-page factors that were preventing this site from reaching it's full potential.

The actual mechanics of optimizing a website is best saved for a  future article, so let's fast forward a bit to the off-page optimization (link building) portion of the campaign and how we acheived so much for so very little money.

The first thing we did is analyze their current backlinks to see who's currently linking to their website, thereby establishing a baseline to improve upon.

Next we reviewed their current customer base to find potential link partners, and we emailed each one. The deal was simple: sites willing to link to our client's website would receive a discount on their next order. Our client was very excited about this method because:
 
1) it costs the client nothing as far as out-of-pocket expenses
2) it generated orders that they otherwise may not have received

Once these "free" links started rolling in, we took it a step further by looking at their top ten competitors' backlinks and offered the same deal to the most relevant sites we found.

The last step was to identify the most important hubs and authority sites for their particular industry, and negotiate advertising deals. We also submitted the site to a few select, very highly targeted directories.

Every one of the links we gained for the client not only provided search engine ranking benefits but clickthrough traffic that led to conversions as well. Our total cost for the entire link building campaign was under $1,500 and resulted in the site ranking on the first page for their most important keywords within just a few months.

SEO for small business websites doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. It's all about knowing where to look and how get the most "bang for your buck".