People carry out search engine optimization to get the search engines like Google and Bing to take notice of their small business websites. This is no different to optimizing for a global business of course but in a local pool it should be easier. That doesn't mean it's a walk in the park though. And small business owners have a lot on their plate already so they should be forgiven for not really knowing or bothering much with SEO for their small business. Still, if you want your small business to rank in the search engines, here are a few tips to get you started.

Select Useful Key Phrases

SEO is all about keywords. You need your business to be shown on the first page of the search engines when your customers search on a particular phrase that is related to your business. The idea is when they search for something you have to offer, it's you they find. Of course, it helps to know what people are actually searching for. Fortunately, Google comes to the rescue here with their free keyword planner. It's a tool that provides lots of information on a keyword or phrase that you enter as well as many related key phrases.

What you do with these keywords and phrases is write content for your website that the search engines will clearly see is related to the keywords that you have chosen. In the past people have said that you should jam your keyword into your content as many times as you can but that will have the opposite to the required result. The search engines are looking for quality content so you should write for people. Content that is written for a human being but is clearly about the keyword subject is likely to get a better rating than if you try to fool the search engines.

Write for People

So you need to write as if you were talking to a person. Just remember that you are addressing a specific topic. Don't allow yourself to ramble on or the search engines will likely get confused about the message you are trying to deliver. The point is you focus on your subject but write for the person who is reading it rather than writing for the search engines.

Snme terms that you should get your head around if you intent to do any SEO for your local business are; on-page SEO, off-page SEO, backlinking, keyword density and page rank. These are important concepts in any SEO strategy. Get to know these first and don't worry about some of the more obscure SEO terms that you are bound to run into.

So if you want to get more visitors, and therefore potential customers, to you web site, it can be well worth looking at doing some SEO for your small business. But don't expect things to happen overnight. The real key to SEO and building traffic to your site is consistency. You will need to keep adding original new content to your site on a consistent basis using the SEO techniques. But doing that can pay off dividends in your small business marketing.