The small business of today has a vast opportunity to compete with national and international companies on the online stage; however, the techniques for marketing online are getting more and more precise. Just because a company is online does not mean that they will be found by the customers that they want to target; there is simply too much noise in the overcrowded online world of Internet marketing for a small business to be seen without a few strategies.
In order to get SEO for small business, a company will need to first learn the rules of engagement. No longer do simple keyword strategies or link building campaigns work. As a matter of fact, these things may get a site banned from the major search engines for life, forcing a company either to change its name or its URL, neither of which is an easy task. The Google Panda and Penguin updates changed forever how the major search engines look at websites.
Although the way in which the major search engines now look at sites is too complex to get into here, there is a simple rule of thumb that all small business owners who are looking to market a company online can adhere to: Do not try to game the system any more. The way that search engines determine which sites are worthy and which are not is too comprehensive for a single person to decipher. For any SEO strategy that is based solely on trying to out game the search engines, a full time outsourced team may be necessary.
For the small business owner, it is much simpler and more time effective simply to enhance the content on his or her site. First, correct any mistakes that are in the web copy. Next, fix any dead links that may still be up. After that, you can use tools such as Google Disavow to go through the links that are attached to your website and “disavow” links that come from low PageRank pages, or even those that you feel may be hurting your site.
No longer does the simple quantity of incoming links determine the value of a page; the value of the linked pages are now also considered. As a rule, you should not link to any page that has a lower PageRank than you do or those that have poor Domain or Page Authority online.
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