The battle for high page rank is no longer controlled by big business. In fact, many of the big businesses that held those high search page positions have been casualties of the recent recession. Dozens of big retailers went under in recent years and many more were absorbed by larger companies who needed to merge to survive the storm. There’s never been a better time for small business SEO. The top spots for your industry keywords are all wide open and waiting for you to step into them.

In the past, a small business couldn’t compete with big money on the internet. The amount of link building, article submissions, and web pages that a small business could come up with in a week could be produced by larger companies in a single day. Those massive teams of in-house internet marketers were just too overwhelming for what an average small business could put together. That has all changed. The big guys are fighting for survival, cutting back all but essential services, and their search engine positioning is suffering because of it.

When it comes to organic SEO, you cannot sit still or you’ll lose your spot. The link building that others did in the past might help them maintain a decent position with search engines for a while, but staying on page one is out of the question unless you continue with the process. Once you get the top spot, you can maintain it by putting together a steady flow of material, but if you stop you’ll lose it. There’s always someone more eager and motivated coming up behind you waiting to take over.

That’s where you come in and that’s where we can help you. For the first time in years it’s actually possible for a small business to take over the top spot for some seriously powerful keywords. We’re talking the single word variety, not just long-tails, though many of them are now easily attainable also. The recession appears to finally be over, but those affected by it are still recovering. Don’t miss out on the opportunity while they’re building to make another push to the top. Use our services and grab those first page placements for yourself.

How exactly does social bookmarking help you? Once you hook up to Digg, Mixx, Sphinn, Technorati, StumbleUpon, and all those others, do you have to build those networks to get a benefit from your connection there? If you want to get the best results, yes you do. Those networks can be powerful media tools for you if you manage them correctly, but you don’t have to if you want to receive a benefit from just putting together a profile. Use anchor text in your description and you’ll score a pretty high powered link from most of them.

Page rank is determined by formulas or algorithms that take into account the number of links which lead back to your site from other quality sites. The weight that the algorithms put into these links is generally determined by the PR, or power ranking of the site they come from. The major social networks are all PR4 or above, so they are links you want which will help you attain a higher page rank. You can get them by placing your URL into the profile you build, but you can get more of a benefit from them by using anchor text in the description.

Website SEO is not rocket science. It’s mainly common sense and lots of hard work. For your efforts to be rewarded, it’s important to make sure that work is done in areas where you’ll see multiple returns, not just one or two. Anchor text inside a social bookmarking description will be seen by many internet users, not just those who are searching for you. Any time a social media search is done for a specific keyword or subject matter relative to your industry, your description and title will pop up in the search results and the anchor text will lead them back to your site.

Anchor text is a good way to disguise a link which is too long or may not be relative to your industry. It can also be used as a call to action command, the most common being “Click Here”. If you know how to create it and better yet where to use it properly you can do a lot with it to improve your page rankings. Most of our organic SEO strategies utilize it in some way and our clients are enjoying top first page positioning for many of their industry’s premium keywords.

Why do internet consumers visit your website? What brought them there in the first place? It’s well known by now that most visitors arrive because they found you by search, but what about those who are searching for keywords you don’t rank for? Where do those consumers find you? Forum posting is one method of capturing that traffic. It’s also a good way to build credibility in your field. Putting your input into a forum on a regular basis will help you to establish yourself as an expert in your industry. When people are looking for an answer to a question, they seek out experts.

When you register to participate in a forum discussion, you create a profile similar to the type used by social media sites. That profile has a spot for you to post your home URL so you automatically pick up a link when you register. Some forums also allow you to use anchor text in your discussion or even in your user name. The latter is a great way to have your link repeated a number of times during a single discussion. It takes a bit of technical knowledge to set up, but its well worth it.

If you don’t know how to create anchor text, contact our Los Angeles SEO office and someone there will be happy to help you. We create links that way on more than half of the different SEO tactics that we use on a daily basis. If you read any of the articles or blog entries we post, including this entry, you’ll see examples of anchor text. Once you learn how to do it, you can use similar tactics yourself in forum discussions or you can have us do it for you. That way you can focus on your own daily tasks.

Organic SEO is by far the most effective way to increase traffic to your website. All of the numbers that we have seen when analyzing traffic over the past ten years have shown that a search position on page one for keywords relative to your industry will bring you quality visitors that convert. If you don’t have that position now, we can get it for you by using forum posting and other proven techniques. Call or email us for more details.

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.