Effective search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the use of specific techniques and structured research and development procedures for building webpages. It's not just putting up basic pages about your local business in the hope that online searchers will find your website.

There are many companies that will promise to get you good search engine rankings.

Have you ever had such an offer?

Quite often, they will search through the deeper pages of of the search engine results, then contact business owners offering to get them better rankings quickly. Before you pay for such a service, here's some information to explain some background information about search engine optimization.

Understanding Keywords

What are Keywords?

Keywords are the search terms used by online searchers, also sometimes referred to as keyterms or key phrases.

Good keyword research should form the solid foundation on which your website is built.

So effective search engine optimization starts with the process of identifying & using good keywords for the information (content) on your website, to help increase referrals of visitor traffic to the site from the search engines. By using highly relevant keywords that searchers are already using to find information on those keyword topics, there is a higher possibility of the searchers finding your website.

Having the optimum number of times the main keyword (or key term) is used in your webpage, will improve your chances of having your website or web pages ranked high in the results of searches done for that keyword.

Note: the key here is to have the appropriate number of times your main keyword is used on the page; too few and your page gets buried deep in the pages of results; too many uses of the keywords and the search engines may penalize you for keyword stuffing.

SEO Factors

Some of the on-page factors include: meta-tags, page titles, headlines and sub-headings, image (alt) attributes, keyword density and distribution, content creation, and internal linking... to name a just few.

Learn more about keywords and optimization directly from the SEO experts themselves, Google.com! See:

• Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web.

How soon your website will get good search engine rankings for your chosen keywords will depend several factors, i.e. on how competitive the keyword is, meaning how many other sites are using the same keywords. Then there are off-page factors, i.e. those not on your website, but also taken into consideration in the search engine algorithms used to rank pages in the results, such as in-pointing links (links from other websites to yours).

If an SEO company promises good rankings for your website, make sure the promised rankings are for highly relevant keywords.

It's not difficult to get good search engine rankings for obscure keywords.

The keywords used for your website should be appropriate for your business market and bring you targeted traffic... visitors interested in your business.

How SEO Affects Local Businesses

As you can see, there are many issues involved in effective search engine optimization, that will influence how well your website ranks in the search engine results.

The growth of the internet has opened up local marketing opportunities for local businesses, but at the time it has increased the competition in your local market.

Unless your business offers a specific hands-on service that can only be provided locally, your competitors are not just the ones in your local neighbourhood...

Make sure your business is ready for the challenge!

Building Your Localbiz Website

If you prefer to build your website yourself, Site Build It! provides a comprehensive Action Guide for building websites, including local business websites.

It explains the keyword research procedures in great depth, and provides proprietary research tools and resources to help with building the site, to take a local business online. The search engine optimization process isn't difficult, because there is an "Analyze It!" service to be used when building webpages, that provides feedback about the on-page SEO factors.

As a busy business owner, building your website may not be a practical option... there is a lot to learn and understand how to build a local business site and make sure it's well-optimized for local search marketing. For help with effective search engine optimization for your local business contact us!

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