SEO Solutions for Small Businesses

There are many SEO services out there, geared towards local and small sized businesses. Their purpose is to establish a presence in the natural search engine rankings on the top search engines, such as Google and Bing. SEO services are a good solution because they are backed by search engine optimization and link building teams, managed by trained SEO account managers.

What You Get with an SEO Service

There are many features that come with an SEO service. You can choose up to ten keywords to help your company be tracked down in search engines, and services also offer keyword research, to help you find the best ones. You get search engine ranking reports, link popularity audit and analysis, and competitive analysis to help you see the fruits of your labor. You can also get recommendations for optimized code analysis and optimized content analysis. Other helpful services are customized link building and management, account management, rankings management, and internal link building and management, to take some of the work off your hands. Scheduled optimized code/content check-ups, website analytics, monthly recommendations, and quarterly reviews are other services that are typically offered by SEO services to keep you on track.

Signing Up With a Service

You can contact an SEO service to inquire more on their company and services. They will have search engine strategy teams that can provide you with specific recommendations and give you a detailed proposal with frees. From that point, services can be customized regarding your needs. Typically, these services will start at around $400 a month.

Having a small business can be tough, especially in a shaky economy, But search engines are the best way to customers and potential clients to find you, so an SEO and Dynamics CRM services can go a long way.

Simple & FREE Password Management

If you are an SEO or multi-domain webmaster – or even just a social site junky, chances are password management is driving you crazy.  If you use more than one computer, accessing your stored passwords can be a real PITA.

In less than 5 minutes, that can all change.  Here is a step-by-step guide to setting up a permanent, flexible, and secure password management solution:

Step 1: Download KeePass.  Choose the Portable KeePass 2.xx version.

Step 2: Extract to a directory of your choosing.  Then run it – you may want to create a desktop or taskbar shortcut.

Step 3: Enter a master account password – choose something new, this is the one password you will ever need to know from now on.  Add one entry (the key icon).

Step 4: This is the powerful step that allows you to access your passwords from all machines and anywhere you happen to be.  Choose file > save as > save to URL.  Enter your ftp details.

Even if you don’t have a server, your ISP likely has given you some space to store a personal page or files.  If you don’t know your ftp details, contact your ISP or network administrator.  ** Choose an easy to remember location.

How it works: Whenever you open KeePass it will access the file on your server.  Whenever you save the file it will upload the newest save to the server.  From now on, from any machine, your passwords will be updated in real time and you will always have the latest passwords!  If you are on a new computer – just download KeePass again, then file > open > open URL.

*  If you like this solution, send KeePass a donation – this is a well supported and extremely useful program.

The Most Popular Search Terms

If you’re going to do work on the Internet or if you have a blog or a website, you want people to be able to find you. In order for them to do that, your site has to appear in the search engine rankings. This doesn’t happen automatically. You have to have terms on your site that the person looking for what you have to offer will be searching under.

Internet, Internet service, and Internet provider are some of the most popular terms for people who do business on the web, but there are many other popular terms, depending on what field you are in. If you have something to sell, using the item that you’re selling and ‘sell’ or ‘buy’ or ‘price’ might be a great way to bring traffic to your site.

There are ways that you can find out what the most popular terms are for your industry, and that will help you bring more visitors to your site, as well. Just make sure that you give them a reason to stay around and buy your products or services once they get there, or having good search terms might not lead to the desired increase in sales.

Shear off the Tedium – SheerSEO Software

There are a lot of positives in SEO. My favorite part is that it allows me the opportunity to dust off my creative side.  Creating new and dynamic web sites, building networks, creating viral link bait…all fun and exciting.  Unfortunately, with anything there is an element of tedium.

Monitoring a web sites overall SEO performance can easily eat up hours of your work day.  This is time that could be used much more effectively in pushing your site or client’s company site up the SEO battlefield.  Creating reports, checking rankings and referrers are all information you need to have, but it is without a doubt a time sink (especially if you are trying to rank numerous key words).

The old addage of time is money is true in Search Engine Optimization too.  If you can cut out some of the tedious and not so fun time consuming work, why wouldn’t you?

I highly recommend using some type of SEO software.  It’s a smart and convenient way to save time and cut some of the mind-numbing day to day drone work that needs to be done.  I personally like SheerSEO for evaluating your sites overall SEO performance.

SheerSEO software is online software, so there’s nothing to clutter up or slow down your desktop.  Once logged in you can track your sites performance in Google & Yahoo.

SheerSEO offers a free 3 month trial, for all new users.  I highly recommend checking out this software.

Social Networking Common Sense

Social networking is becoming the next big thing for businesses as well as for people, but if you don’t know what you’re doing with it you could end up with a problem. That’s because a lot of people take their social networking very seriously, and there are also people out there who aren’t the most honest individuals that you could ever meet.

In order to use social networking effectively you’ll need to exercise some common sense. First, you shouldn’t put anything on your site, anywhere, that you wouldn’t want a potential employer or a potential customer to see. It’s ok if you have some weird hobbies or if you like to party on the weekends – just keep that information to yourself and off of the Internet.

You want to set a good impression, and sometimes you have to keep things off of your profile in order to do that. That doesn’t mean that you should lie, because employers and customers don’t like that, but you have to watch what information you offer to others.