SEO Basics for Small Business

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Today's consumers search for information online, shop online, compare prices online and interact socially online. In short, what the malls were in the 1980s, the Internet is today. As a result, there is plenty of potential to harness all that Internet traffic to promote your business, and one way to do it is by understanding SEO keywords.

SEOs, or Search Engine Optimized keywords, are words that seek to capture the search parameters of online users. So, for example, most users who run a search query online will use the word "fast" instead of "quick." For this simple reason, if you describe your business as "the quickest service on the market" you are likely to lose many visitors over a website that describes itself as "the fastest service."

To be able to find strong SEO keywords to promote your small business, you must first learn which words or phrases people are using when they run a search on the Internet. A good free website that can help you is Google's free keyword tool. There you can enter words or phrases that describe your business. Once you run a search for these words, the keyword tool will list all related searches with relevant data.

There are several things this data can teach you about finding strong SEO keywords to promote your small business. For one thing, look for a keyword with a high number of queries. The higher the number, the higher the number of people who are using this keyword in their searches. However, bear in mind that the keyword may be part of a bigger phrase search. For example, "Love" maybe part of "romantic love," "platonic love," "first love," or "lost love," each a very different concept. For this reason, I recommend describing your business with a 3-word keyword phrase, for example: elegant men's clothing.

Second, pay attention to whether the number of inquiries on a keyword is global or local. This may be relevant to your business.

Finally, pay attention to the competition bar. This will show you, in graph form, how much competition there is on the Internet for this particular keyword.

You may also want to click on the hyperlink to see how many items of content your keyword will compete with if you choose it. For example, a keyword with 5,000 queries may look attractive, but if there are 280,000,000 items of content on the Internet already you might want to choose a different keyword after all.

Once you've identified the best keywords to attract attention, use those keywords to describe your business on your website, on Twitter, on Facebook and on local venues. Be sure that the metatags on your own web pages reflect appropriate keywords for each page, and intersperse SEO keywords through your text sparingly so your pages don't get filtered out as spam by search engines.

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