5 Things Every Small Business Needs to Know About SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques used to improve the organic (natural) search engine rankings of web pages. Google, which dominates the search market, with upwards of 65% marketshare, is the search engine to optimize for. What works for Google generally works for other search engines, but there are tweaks that are useful to optimize Bing-powered results. Here are five things every small business owner needs to know about SEO.

1. SEO is highly complex. There is no magic formula, no shortcut: improving rankings requires a number of onsite and offsite activities that revolve around content optimization, link acquisition, and site structure. If any one of these areas is neglected, rankings will suffer. For most small businesses, obtaining relevant and high authority links (backlinks) to the site is the most challenging ongoing aspect of its SEO program.

2. SEO can require a complete site overhaul. If your site was not built to be SEO-friendly, it may need a complete rebuild in order to support an SEO program. At our agency we see this all the time, even with large firms, but small businesses are especially vulnerable because their sites were often built by freelance designers/developers who don't have a background in SEO.

3. SEO is continually changing. The formula, or algorithm, that Google uses to rank web pages is always being refined in order to deliver the most relevant results for a given search query. Because Google changes its "rules or relevance", SEO techniques that were effective even a year ago may be neutral or counterproductive today. With this in mind, be sure to review and update your SEO strategy every quarter or every six months.

. Select SEO partners with great care. Many self-proclaimed SEO "experts" employ flawed methodologies, for one reason or another. This problem has plagued the industry from inception; clients have had bad experiences and jumped to the conclusion that SEO is snake oil. Not so: but it's vital to vet SEO firms thoroughly, checking references and scrutinizing actual results obtained for other clients in similar businesses. If you can't understand what the SEO is telling you, or it doesn't quite make sense -- keep looking.

5. SEO is NOT lead generation. Evaluating your SEO program means evaluating improvement in unbranded search traffic. It does not mean evaluating leads generated from your site. The entire purpose of SEO is to make your site pages rank well for search queries that are important to your business. Once a searcher has clicked through to your site, the SEO job is over. Lead generation revolves around an entirely different marketing discipline known as conversion optimization -- I'll cover that in an upcoming article.

Learn more about Internet marketing:5 SEO Basics for Business Blogs5 Things to Know about Google+