Small Business Marketing Series: Effective, Effortless Websites

Improve Your Page Rank on Search Engines

Maintaining and updating a small business website can often become a huge headache for business owners. Many small business owners start by outsourcing the creation of a website, which is then hosted on a service that may or may not be the host for the e-commerce site.

After the site is live and inevitable changes are required, making those changes typically involves re-engaging the contractor to do the updates. Because small business owners often defer updates to their sites in order to bundle as many changes as possible into a single work order, websites can quickly get out of date and begin to fall down in the rankings of natural (or organic) search engine results.  And keeping your website as high as possible in natural search results — called search…

Web Marketing 101 Series: Intro to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process by which owners of websites make improvements to the content, HTML code and inbound links of their web pages to make it easier for search engines to index them, and to ensure their pages naturally appear in results for relevant searches.

When you view a search engine result page in Google, Yahoo! Search or Microsoft Live Search, you almost always see two kinds of results: Sponsored Links, which advertisers pay to place on the page, and natural search results.  On Google, for instance, sponsored links can be found on the top and right-hand sections of the page, while natural (or organic) search results can be found in the main section of the page.  At the bottom of the page, you’ll typically see that the page is one of many,…