Don’t have a website, but running a small business? How weird is that! Get a website right away, or forget about entrepreneurial stuff and get a job. Yes, that’s how it is these days, and that’s how, it seems, it’s gonna be for a long time to come.

If you are planning to start a small business, you need an online presence. Pure and simple!

Fine, so you have gone and got yourself a cool website, with movies, sounds, and the works. You think it’s the coolest thing on earth, and you spend your spare time working on it or just gazing at the cool fireworks. Nice, but guess what? You are still far from getting there. Your site may be cool, but probably nobody ever visits your site, and you don’t get a single call from prospective clients.

Now what?
There’s a whole new world called Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you want success online, you need to either learn SEO/SEM yourself, or hire someone (like us) to do your SEO for you. SEO is almost the only way to proactively market yourself online. SEO is the key to passive internet marketing.

WHAT IS SEO

You know what a search engine is, of course. So you are looking for something online, say, cruise booking for the wife to Jamaica. So you open up Google and type in cruise and Jamaica, and hit enter. Then what happens? Google produces page after page of websites for you that it thinks may be relevant to what you are looking for. You scroll through the list, and usually, in that first page itself, you find a cruise agent in your locality that you like. So you call them up and book a Jamaican vacation.

Cool, right?

Ok, so now, say, you are running a flower delivery biz in the locality. Say someone searches “flowers” in Google, just like you did for cruise. As a small biz owner, where would you want to be?

RIGHT ON THAT FIRST PAGE!

That’s what good SEO can do for you. It can optimize your website in such a way that it will appear on top of search engines whenever someone searches with keywords that are relevant to your business.

Relevance is the key. Google and other search engines like Bing, yahoo or msn use software to search millions of web pages. It’s like a quick glance through a book – how do you determine what a chapter is about, in a quick glance? Well, the title, the headings, the para headings, similar phrases occurring multiple times – these things tell you what a chapter is about, without reading (and understanding) the whole chapter.

It’s the same concept here. Google uses software (called robots) that glance through pages of your websites in milliseconds, looking for words that appear in certain important sections. When they find a word appearing to be the key to your webpage, they categorize your page under that keyword. Now, when someone searches for that keyword, Google brings up your website.

This is SEO; the technique of making Google see you as you want to be seen, making Google grab those keywords that you want to define your business with, and making you appear on page 1 whenever someone searches for those keywords. That, in a nutshell, and to be very simplistic really, is a snapshot of SEO and how to use it to market your business online.