Before I go into detail about SEO, It is good to know that the most important thing to keep in mind is quality and original content. Unique and quality content, on-page optimization, and good social media marketing will help any business grow.

For most small business owners, just having a website is a challenge, let alone having the site ranked on the major search engines. SEO can help both big and small business grow and make it easy for people to find a targeted website.

Simply having a website alone isn’t going to help anymore. There is no point of having a site that no one can find. Small businesses especially need to be seen for it to grow and increase its sales. You can always put your website’s URL on your business card—It’s 2013! People use computers and smart phones more than anything nowadays. A website will have more visits if it is easy to reach and when it can be viewed on different devices to ensure easy access to computers and other mobile devices. SEO is a guaranteed method to increase traffic to your site and hence, increase the rankings on search engines.

On page optimization:

Keyword research is very crucial for any Internet marketing strategy. This will help you focus and create the foundation of your website. Find the keywords that are related to your business and what people are actually searching for on major search engines. Keyword research is not rocket science—for example, if you are selling handmade clothes, focus on keywords related to handmade clothes. Location is another important factor when selecting a good keyword. Always attach the location you want to focus your business on. Branding is another thing to keep in mind when it comes to consistency.

Maintaing SEO

SEO is not a one-time thing, but a continuing process. Never let any of your SEO hard work go to waste. Once your website is done and optimized, it is important to maintain it in order to improve your rankings. Due to search engines updates, there are a lot of SEO strategies that used to work before that don’t work now and may even hurt your site.Those updates could lead to several issues like your site not being indexed, penalties due to duplicate content, or bad backlinks, and other issues. Here are some of the important website maintenance techniques that I will explain in detail later on:

• Social Media Marketing
• Link Building
• Blog Posts: Adds new content to your site
• Monitor your rankings: using ranking reports,Google Webmaster tool, Google analytics, etc.

By: Naima