As a dentist with people to see and mouths to clean, the whole idea of website SEO probably does not arouse a whole lot of excitement in you.  While checking out molars and incisors might be some people’s idea of horror, you have it handled.  So why would you want to practice all this small business SEO?  And even more than that, why in the world would you want to make a video?

While it is true that the majority of society wants to see about a hundred million things more than it wants to see the inside of a person’s mouth, a video can help your business (and the lives of your potential customers) a lot.  For one thing, a video of how your office works, or something to do with dentistry in general, can make oral care into a more approachable territory for people who might otherwise be afraid of it.

While the notion of “dentist as sales person” seems ridiculous – you are a medical professional who has dedicated your life to helping people – you do still have bills to pay.  And one day, you may want to retire comfortably.  So there is nothing wrong with keeping a nice, wide client base, and bringing in a healthy profit through making all those healthy smiles.  So it makes sense that, since your primary motive is not just “making a profit” as it would be with many businesses, your website SEO would be more a matter of helping others than helping yourself.

And that gets right back the previous point.  If you were most businesses, you would just make an interesting or entertaining video (probably involving a singing dog, or something), right along with a link to your web site.  But you are not most businesses, and most small business SEO practices are just not your thing.

As a dentist, you have a unique type of knowledge that most people could find fascinating, if not for one simple fact.  Mouths are gross places, and most people’s mental picture of a dentist’s office is long needles, numb faces, and the horrible sound of the drill.  Seriously, does that drill have to sound so much like an implement of torture?  A video can be how you pull back the veil, and show modern dentistry for what it is – a clean, safe, nearly painless process which helps people to look and feel a lot better every day.

We all know that small business SEO is of vital importance in the modern world.  No matter what kind of business you run, if nobody knows about you in the first place, no one will convert from lead to customer.  And while press release services are great, and directory submission will get you in a lot of different doors, there is an option that a lot of small business owners have never even thought of before.

And that idea, dear reader, is video SEO.  Yes, in this day and age, you can make videos that your target customers may very well stumble upon… and once you have planted the seed in their minds that your company is interesting, and can solve their problems, you will have customers come to you when they need what you have on offer.

Why would you pay for a bunch of clicks?  While PPC management can be beneficial, it is most useful in certain niches.  Every person who can see can use a video, especially if that video offers content which either entertains or teaches something valuable.  Never underestimate the power of the human eye – the experts say that we eat with our eyes, and very often think with our eyes.  So why would we not also buy with our eyes, as well?

When you secure a person’s eye sight and direct it where you want it to go, the organic SEO process you started inside your web site can begin to grow and flourish.  From there, casual observers turn into your leads.  And if a few other variables go correctly, those fresh leads will turn into sales.  And isn’t that a worth while use of your time?

No matter what your product or service offering might happen to be, you can figure out a way to display it through a video.  If you teach something, offer a few free lessons, with the subtle message at the end of “if you liked this, you will love more at our site…”  This is huge, as your niche of customers selects itself right off the bat.  And once they have come to you, the process of getting referrals can also begin.

Have you (or anyone you know) done any really stupid activities at some point in the past ten years?  If so, there is a pretty good chance that you are on YouTube.  That ubiquitous, user dominated site (which naturally sold for millions of dollars) is a prime place for a little cleverly disguised small business SEO.  But you have to think it through, and follow some common sense steps, if you want to get first page placement through the use of videos.

For one thing, you have got to have a plan.  Just like any other part of your organic SEO plan, your YouTube video has got to be a carefully, brilliantly orchestrated work of advertising art worthy of Andy Warhol.  You can not just turn on the camera, stutter for a minute while you think up something you want to say, and then start mumbling or slurring it out.  When it comes to making a great viral video, planning is paramount.

For another thing, you need to know who you are making this video for.  If you are trying to attract skaters, you would obviously want to go about film making from a wholly different mind set than if you were out to attract college professors.  While there is doubtless a bit of overlap between the two groups, you are going to want to understand how your target market thinks – and skaters and college professors likely think way differently.

And for possibly the most important part, make sure you use the right web presenter.  If you choose an actor who is completely alien to your target audience, you had better make sure that the person is alien in a funny and or interesting way.  If you are marketing to college students, for instance, you would most likely not want to employ a circus clown – unless you intended to have him deliver his lines in a completely deadpan way, which would add some subversive ironic value to the piece.

And finally, remember that a viral video is not just an ad.  It has to give some kind of value to your target audience.  People are super sensitive to “that’s just an ad,” and they have the power (and a good reason) to click away if they think you are just trying to sell them something.  While a video can give you great organic SEO, it can also hurt your reputation, if you turn into spam.

Taking your business to the next level is about way more than just article writing and distribution.  While articles are certainly important to build up the value of your business, they do tend toward being a bit “business impersonal.”  Getting your small business SEO to the next level is going to take a lot more than just writing great articles.  If you want your business to go from “just okay” to “Okay!,” you are going to have to get to blog posting.

A lot of people think of blog posting, and react exactly the same way.  “Isn’t a blog just a place where you spout off about the latest little annoyance in your life?”  While that is definitely the case for some people, that is NOT the case at all for professional business owners.  When you own a business, your blog posting activities revolve around far higher ranking goals than just “spouting off.”

For one thing, your blog is your chance to point out things that your readers (who are also your potential customers) might never have even thought about before.  You can talk about any number of different subjects related to your business, or even to the thoughts which go through your head regarding running your business.  A blog can be a reasonably personal document – just as long as it does not turn into your personal “therapy session.”

For another thing, blog posting allows you to let your potential customers know, step by step, what goes into producing the products or services they love.  Say you are an event planner – people are bound to think, “Even planning is EASY.  Just make a few phone calls and some reservations, and make a mint.”  But planning an event when more than a handful of people are involved can quickly escalate into a logistical nightmare.  So tell the world about it!

Tell the world about the caterer who misspelled the names on a wedding cake, or the florist who somehow thought “bar mitzvah” was “funeral.”  In retrospect, your annoyances can be very entertaining.  And they can also give your business a lot of additional “Oh” value to those who would have otherwise had no clue.

Let’s face at least two facts today.  For one, Google pretty much rules the world.  As the world’s largest internet company, they can exert a massive amount of control over just about any part of the web search process.  The now ubiquitous phrase “Google it” refers to just how powerful this search engine behemoth has gotten over the last few years.  And when you are intending to do some website SEO, Google is going to pretty much top your list of people to please.

The second fact is, organic SEO is no longer a way to zoom ahead of your competition.  In this day and age, if you are not practicing organic website SEO at a high level, your competitors are leaving you to eat their dust (while they get all of your potential customers – bon apetit).  And no matter what kind of site you are running, we are ALL working for Google at some level.

Let us consider mobile website design.  If your web site is too wordy, you can forget about it.  Nobody wants to read War and Peace on a little tiny smart phone screen – if they were big enough for proper reading, they would be laptops and not cell phones any more.  And most people do not want to spend ten minutes scrolling around with their phone, trying to make out what that massive image on your site might be.  So naturally, traditional computer based ideas of what constitutes a smart web site design are out.  But website SEO does not stop just because the medium has changed.

And keep in mind that often times, the people make the product into what it ends up being.  While directory submission is normally a reasonably useful way to get your site noticed, it becomes even more powerful when you couple it with the fact that Google’s entire reason for being is to find and share knowledge.  If you bring great content, and then you show it to people, they will become little advertisers for you.  And Google will find their glowing reviews, and a star will be born of your site.

When you start out with website SEO, you may think that “you get what you pay for” has to automatically mean “expensive equals good.”  But this is not the case in the slightest.  In fact, affordable SEO is how the game is played, in this day and age.  If you are paying a heavy premium for your small business SEO, you may actually be paying too much for a bunch of frills you may not even need.

A lot of times, dealing with a big company does not turn into making big gains.  When you hire a huge law firm to represent you in court, they send two trainees, one experienced lawyer, and charge you for all three at the highest rate of the group (whether or not they actually do anything).  And often enough, Atticus Finch could defend you just as well.  And when it comes to optimizing your web site for the search engines, this is very much the case, as well.

Consider that getting first page placement is tricky, which is most likely why you decided to outsource this task in the first place.  After all, if we were all SEO pros, the first page simply would not be big enough to hold ALL of our sites.  A good professional search engine optimizer is going to take you, step by step, through the organic SEO process, which will end up with your web site not only delivering good content to those who stumble on it.  In the end, the RIGHT customers are going to do more than just stumble onto your site.

When it comes down to it, the first stage of any SEO operation revolves around knowing who you want to attract – since no site is perfect for everybody, you have to have your niche firmly in mind, and give the people what they want.  And the second stage of the SEO process is just looking through your site, and noticing the little “tweaks” you can make, to make the whole process of being noticed by the search engines run with a smoother stride.  And once those two parts are done, all that remains is in the doing.

Does it really take a huge company with oak paneled offices and fancy letterhead to make your web site shine?  Of course not.  So don’t pay more than you should!

There is a lot to love about employing a real professional to do your search engine optimization.  Whether you are into small business SEO, or whether you are on the cusp of taking your website SEO to the next level, a professional is often your very best bet.  And when it comes to getting your business off the ground, and taking it to the next level, why would you skimp?  Here are a few benefits of farming out your search engine optimization, especially to an organic SEO pro:

1. You get the job done whether you are working on it or not.

A website SEO professional is going to work tirelessly to get your web site optimized, and get your business recognized.  That means that even if you happen to be on vacation (and couldn’t you use one?), the SEO pro is going to keep plugging away at making your web site pop out of the search engine crowd like the old “sore thumb.”  And you just can not beat that kind of dependability… which is something no amateur is going to give you.

2. They know what they are talking about.

Professionals in any discipline have a great deal of “insider” knowledge that we lay people simply do not possess.  If your SEO pro mentions “PPC management,” and you have to ask what that is, you know you are dealing with someone whose knowledge base outstrips your own by a wide margin.  And just like with your surgeon or your lawyer, don’t you want the situation handled by a person who is “in the know?”

3. Professionals stand by the quality of their work.

We all know the true hallmark of a professional – when they do a job, they stand by it to the end, and stand behind their results.  If a solution which a professional tries does not work the first time, they fix it.  And if the first two or three attempts they try do not work, they just keeping working to make it work the right way.

For a true professional, the success of your business is also the success of their business.

The success of your business depends on how effective your advertising is. Period. Publicity is necessary for any business endeavor, but things are much simpler and easier when it’s online.

Advertising a business online is a lot different than in the real world. The publicity you are striving to gain must be accomplished in an entirely different fashion. Not to mention that a lot more opportunities are available for effective advertising online. These opportunities are also much easier and cheaper than their real-world counterparts. One extremely effective tool for online advertising is a press release.

The goal of a press release is to provide the media with information about your products or services. Creating an announcement will result in media coverage for your business, which will turn into quality traffic to your site.

There are a lot of benefits from using a press release service as a means of advertising your business, provided it is carried out in a professional manner. It is advisable to use a professional press release service for many reasons.

Writing a good press release should not be a demanding task. However, there are both good and bad ways to go about writing one. It is vital for the content to follow a certain structure and give specific information regarding your business. Also, it is very important to keep the release from any errors or inaccuracies. As a result, the use of a professional press release service is recommended, as a professional writer with experience can handle this in a much more skillful manner.

Press releases do not have a long life span. Therefore, the most effective way to use them is to let professionals submit the press release to the best websites and news portals. This way, you have a much better chance at gaining links, which will improve your web site’s search engine rankings.

The last thing to consider is that paid press release services are much more effective than free ones. They offer much more coverage and are much more efficient in creating a link building campaign.

A good press release service is an amazing advertising tool for online businesses. However, improper use can prove disastrous. Therefore, it is vital to use a professional service to ensure your campaign has effective results.

The biggest reason why email marketers fail is because they don’t target their audience. Using an opt-in mailing list is the biggest step in creating a successful email marketing campaign. If you do not use direct response marketing, you won’t be going very far. Even if your audience doesn’t mark your emails as spam, they will most likely not be read.

There are three major strategies to increase your targeted email marketing campaign. They are using a targeted email list, getting your prospects permission and utilizing action-provoking subject lines. Let’s go over these now.

Using a targeted email list does not mean buying a list of emails from someone and blasting them with email software. What you need to do is focus on a specific audience and send the right message. To do so, you must do some research to determine who your actual target is. Only after you do this can you create a highly targeted email list.

The next step in targeted email marketing is to get your prospective audiences permission. The easiest way to do this is to have them complete a lead capture form. This part of email marketing is the opt-in process.

Many programs are available to scan websites for email addresses to use for marketing purposes. These people didn’t give you permission to email them. Even if you have something great to tell them, this method will be considered spam and will not help you if you are trying to make a legitimate business.

The final step in a successful campaign is to use action-provoking subject lines. Creating a compelling subject line will get more of your emails opened up by your audience. Which of these is a catchier subject line:

Targeted E-Mail Marketing Strategies, or 5 Steps to 50 Leads in a Day?

Using a compelling subject line is not the only step, as you must also deliver what you have promised. Hyping up your subject lines is just not enough if you fail to provide a quality product afterwards. If you can do both, you will build trust with your subscribers and continue to gain a larger audience.

Forum posting, used properly, is an effective way to advertise. In actuality, it is one of the cheapest and fastest ways to advertise. Forum posting costs nothing and as soon as you post your advertisement, you will see traffic to your website.

Why use forums for advertising? Not only is forum posting a cheap and fast way to advertise, but you are targeting your traffic. People go to forums based on certain subjects to socialize and find information that they need. If you had a website based on cars, and there is a car forum, advertising your website there would peak the interest of the forum users and you will gain a lot of targeted traffic. There are a few things to keep in mind when forum posting, though.

Forum posting is not a new way to advertise. People have been doing this for years, and most users are tired of seeing links spammed everywhere on their forum. Thus, it is essential to make a name for yourself in the community. Gaining credibility and trust from the forum users is as easy as talking to them. See what they are interested in, and what they are looking for.

Give advice and any useful or interesting information you can find. Not only will you become noticed in the community, but you will gain insightful information about what your consumers are looking for. If you do not make a name for yourself, not only will you lose traffic to your site, but you can and will be outright banned from the forums for spamming.

In order to gain credibility, first start with your profile. Write a description of yourself and even post a picture. Do not say you are an expert in your field if you are not. You will be outed by the other experts and most likely banned permanently from the forum. As mentioned before, in order to gain credibility, you must socialize. That’s pretty much it. Be helpful to others and share interesting information when you can.

After you have some level of credibility, it’s time to advertise. Start by creating a link to your website in your signature. Another option is to read posts and find readers who are looking for something that your site has to offer. Feel free to advertise your site then. However, do not post your link everywhere. Even if you are only posting your link when it is relating to the topic at hand, some forum moderators may still think you are spamming. So do it in moderation.

Forum posting is an easy way to advertise. Effective forum posting, however, takes a little more. Just be friendly and helpful and you will see traffic eventually. Also, these are your consumers, so learn as much as you can from them. It will help in your future marketing campaigns.