Situated Research's Blog

The importance of search engine optimization is well known to most business owners. What is equally well known is the fact that good optimization advice does not come cheap and bad advice comes cheap but costs a lot in the long run (think websites getting banned on Google).

While targeting the most popular keywords in competitive sectors might no longer be feasible for most new businesses on a tight budget, there are still numerous options available to such businesses.

A lot of the opportunities arise from Google’s Universal Search concept, where regular organic listings are mixed in with other search results such as images, videos, maps and so on.

Here are five alternative SEO strategies that can be implemented by small business owners themselves, without having to pay for expert SEO help:

1. Use Google Local Business Listings

Whether your business is bricks and mortar or online only, you will have a registered business address, which can be used to get your company listed on the Google Local Business Center.

Once you’re verified, ensure that your most important target keyword is in your listing title and some associated keywords are used within the description.

Get your clients to share their feedback by leaving reviews on your local business listing in Google and get other sites, such as local business directories to link to this listing.

2. Get listed on Google Products

Create a simple product feed and add as much detail as you can, with information about the products you sell, their descriptions, prices, dimensions etc.

Ensure that main keywords such as the brand name and product name are included in the title of each product listing.

Try and get as many positive reviews as possible from customers who buy the products. You could even go so far as to provide discounts to everyone who provides a review.

3. Create “How To” Videos

Users often search for information. Creating videos that answer their informational queries is a great way to gain organic placement in such search results pages.

In order to ensure that your video ranks in the organic results, optimize the video title for the keywords you’re targeting, get lots of viewers to comment on, link to and mark your video as a favorite.

4. Build a social media presence

Real time search results are growing in importance. Trending topics make their way to the organic search results regularly. Establishing a steady flow of posts on sites like Twitter and Face book will help drive a percentage of the traffic on these terms to your site.

5. Cover latest industry news

Ranking on Google News for trending topics is relatively easy. Ensure that your news article’s title contains your target keywords, and produce unique, good quality news stories that help your site get a number of other blogs and sites linking to it.

Written By: Farhad Divecha

Posted By: Situated Research, LLC

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2010 at 11:00 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.