By Robert Lockard

I read an article on Entrepreneur.com a while back, entitled, “Rev up the Search Engines.” It gives a helpful rundown of solid SEO principles for small businesses, which don’t have a whole lot of money to spare but need to start generating results from ecommerce.

This article gives six tips for a small business to get the most bang for its buck, when it comes to search engine optimization. They are attributed to Steve Wiideman, a fairly renowned SEO expert. I already talked about most of these in my SEO series in the eHarbor Blog, back in February and March of 2009. But I think a refresher is healthy.

Here are some of the highlights I took from these tips:

- Search engines are getting smarter. Don’t expect Google, Bing or Yahoo to fall for the same old SEO tricks. Bloggers and other content generators used to focus on their keyword-to-content ratio, but now search engines recognize when you use the same keyword too many times in the same post. Use relevant keywords prudently. If you use keyword-stuffing tactics, don’t expect much success.

- Google should be the focus of your SEO strategy. I thought this one was interesting because, while Google is certainly the king of search engines at the moment, things can change fairly quickly in the digital age. Of course, Google is constantly changing its algorithm for search results and it’s even changing its search engine completely with new products like Google Wave, Google Caffeine and a focus on social media, images and music. But that’s the topic of a whole other blog entry.

- If an SEO consulting company guarantees No. 1 placement on Google or any other search engine, don’t believe them. Google is the only that can absolutely guarantee top placement on its results pages, and every other company has to do its best to influence Google, but none can absolutely guarantee success. Keep that in mind when you come across SEO companies’ marketing messages.

Having said that, I’ll note Submit Solution is a good SEO resource for you. Submit Solution has more than 13 years of experience working on Internet marketing, which includes search engine optimization. It’s a great resource because it has helped many companies like yours reach customers online through its efforts. Like I said, they can’t guarantee No. 1 placement for competitive search terms, but you can expect dramatic improvements in your search-engine rankings for specific keywords in the months after they start implementing their SEO strategies on your behalf.

Keep coming back to the Submit Solution SEO Blog for the latest updates on major search-engine trends. This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog entry, “Top SEO tactics for small businesses.” The photo of the flying bicyclist is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Tom Grundy Photo.

By Britnee Nguyen

Building external links is one of the vital things utah SEO technicians do to get their clients to the top of their search engine listings. These links are important to promote SEO for a site, but it’s also important to look at the internal links – those links that are already located within your website.

Internal links sometimes gets overlooked, but can help your utah online marketing immensely. You really should be taking care of your internal links before working on external ones. There’s times when a site with a better internal structure gets ranked hirer than one with a poor internal structure with a number of external links. The great thing about internal links is that they’re coming from an authoritative site which is your own. Authority is something that external links sometimes lack.

Internal links are used by search engine spiders to see what is on all of your pages. So you’ll want to build the content on your website by using keywords you’re targeting through out it. When you increase the page rank of your internal pages it will overall increase your site’s ranking.

If your website has been on the utah internet marketing for a good amount of time, it tends to get better SEO than others because it has a history of internal links that search engines use. If your website is newer, it will take time for the results to take effect, but it can definitely be ranked higher through internal links if done correctly.

Also, remember that not only should keywords be put into your content, but should be put into file names as well. utah SEO keywords should cover codes, tags, anchors, picture files, folder names, etc. It isn’t just limited to the content of your website.

If you place an image on your website and it’s named “1023940.jpg” then the search engines aren’t going to read it. But, if you named it “onlinebirthdaycards.jpg” for your on-line birthday cards website, then the search engines will be able to pick that up and rank you better.

Internal linking is important to get all of your pages found by search engine spiders. It’s useless to have 40 pages throughout your website if only six of them are being found. Keep internal linking in mind in your SEO efforts and Utah internet marketing techniques.

By Britnee Nguyen

SEO… It’s been around since the creation of the internet, but hasn’t really become a focus of companies to use until five years ago. Search engine optimization has successfully helped hundreds of companies reach high on search engine lists to get noticed more by on-line users.

Different strategies are used such as including keywords in page headers, titles, hyperlinks, navigation bar, ALT description and META tags. Another important valuable tactic is to use unique content writing. The actual content with keywords inserted that are posted on websites can help increase traffic flow and improve sales. Because not only does it provide an avenue to display keywords, but those who visit the website will notice the quality of it too.

There are a few things you should look for when writing SEO-quality content. First, make sure your content is not duplicated or copied from somewhere else. This includes even just a sentence or phrase; it could affect your rankings. Original content is the best way to go to and preferably by a real human being – not a robot.

If you have a robot or foreigners write your content, it most likely won’t have completely correct grammar and good word usage. Hiring a person with a background in writing, English, or journalism will give you better assurance that they will do a good job and write content that will draw viewers in. For example, Submit Solution has a content team that was specifically hired to write quality content for their websites. If they had outsourced, they might not be guaranteed they will get what they are looking for.

One last thing – when writing, be sure to keep in mind who your audience is. If you write very informal on a medical website, then viewers will not be impressed and not think it’s professional and won’t purchase services. If you wrote the content in a formal voice for the medical site, then it will fit better for the company and its customers. So not only should you write SEO content just for search engines, but you should cater it to your readers as well.

Flickr Photo Credit: Linda Cronin