Search engine optimization for small businesses

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group

Many business owners believe that they are simply stuck with whatever ranking the search engines happen to bestow upon them at that given point in time, while some of the more technologically savvy business owners understand that certain techniques can be utilized to drastically improve the ranking of a web site. Collectively, these techniques are called search engine optimization and unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation often presented as fact on the subject – often by industry insiders. To further complicate the matter, the algorithms that search engines use to determine the importance and relevance of a particular page are constantly evolving to provide more useful results while combating spam or black hat optimization techniques.

So, if many of the so called professionals in the search engine optimization industry are operating off of incorrect or incomplete information and the algorithms that power the search engines are constantly evolving, is there really any way for a smaller business to benefit from search engine optimization?

The short answer is yes.

While outsourcing your company’s search engine optimization campaign will usually produce results far more quickly than learning and implementing the necessary techniques on your own, you’ll need to take the time to carefully research any optimization companies before hiring them. Unfortunately, many of these companies are more than willing to use techniques that can put your web site at a high risk of being banned by the search engines just to get quick results. When this happens, they only risk loosing you as a client but your business risks loosing the long term revenue that would be generated by your web site.

On the other hand, if you choose to learn and implement the necessary techniques in-house you’ll need to ensure that you get your information from reliable sources and stay up to date on the latest changes in the algorithms. You should get your information from the internet rather than books, which are usually not up to date. Additionally, you should take a look at the “webmaster guidelines” published by the major four search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN & Ask, in that order) to learn what they consider to be black hat techniques.

Which ever approach you take you’ll need to understand that search engine optimization is a marathon, not a sprint. An effective campaign can often take six months or more of steady work before showing significant results. This can not be changed by simply increasing the amount of work being preformed, in fact, it can actually have a detrimental effect on your optimization campaign. Another thing to consider is that even once you’ve achieved the results that you were after, you’ll still have to continue your campaign if you want to maintain them.

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