A Step-by-Step Guide to Small Business SEO
By James Hubbard
You can view the full contents of this guide here.
With this step-by-step guide to small business SEO (search engine optimisation), I hope to provide an easy to follow yet detailed and comprehensive account of everything an internet start-up or established small to medium size business needs to do to ensure their chances of success in the search engines and online in general. This guide is written based on my own 6+ years experience of optimising websites for my employers and clients. I have helped many small businesses to achieve page 1 results on Google and other search engines and my aim with this guide is to help you do the same.
Why follow this particular guide?
There are, of course, hundreds of places to go on the internet to find SEO guides and advice. Most of what you will come across online or in book format purport to offer much the same thing; tips and techniques for optimising your web pages, helping you to achieve top ten positions in search engines for particular key-phrase searches. The guide I am offering here will be no different in this respect, so why should you follow my advice?
Firstly, by focusing on small business SEO, I will be offering a distinct set of strategies for internet start-ups and small to medium size businesses that are relatively new to search marketing. Many SEO guides try to offer a uniform approach to best practice, sometimes indicating to those unfamiliar with the subject that the same set of rules can be applied to big, well-established sites as to relatively new ones. With this guide I intend to provide advice tailored specifically to the needs of new and developing businesses.
Secondly, my aim is to help small businesses keep their web development costs as low as possible. I will be offering advice on topics such as how to produce affordable, professional and search engine friendly websites. I will also be offering advice on general SEO pitfalls and how to avoid them, helping you to keep your costs low and your website ethical.
Ultimately, this guide is aimed at equipping small business owners with the key information required to make informed choices about which stages of the SEO process to bring in-house and which to outsource. SEO can be a very time consuming and labour intensive task; hence the outsourcing of certain elements may be inevitable. However, there are many things you can do to keep your outsourcing costs as low as possible and I hope to outline many of these tasks throughout.
But won’t your advice go out of date?
Some may argue that writing step-by-step SEO guides is a pointless task as constant, and sometimes dramatic, changes to search engine algorithms renders certain processes obsolete. Whilst I agree that SEO is an evolutionary subject matter, I also believe that many aspects central to it are likely to remain forever at its crux: great, accessible content and links from credible sources being two absolutely key factors. In any case, I intend to regularly update each chapter of this guide and adjust any information that appears out-of-date. I will also provide a closing chapter on new search engine developments.
Part Two
To get this guide underway, part two will cover the first topic of web hosting and how choosing the right web hosting solution has SEO implications. Click here to go to part two.
