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SEO is every bit as important for small businesses as it is for corporate business – possibly more, because you can’t rest on the laurels of your big brand to get and keep customers. If you’re not already acting on an organic search engine optimization strategy, now’s the time to start!

Here are 20 quick tips to help small business owners and marketers make their websites more searchable, accessible and usable, driving more traffic and ultimately more customers for clear ROI. SEO Basics & On-Page SEO

1. Two important places on a page to put your keyword are the title and the URL.

2. Those are the places where it will almost certainly display in the search results.

3. Consider SEO when branding your company and any products or services you introduce: Is the domain available? How competitive are the terms? Is it easy to remember and type?

4. Avoid hyphens in your domain name (examplesite.com is better than example-site.com).

5. Human-readable, user-friendly URLs trump URLs with numerical query parameters (example.com/keyword-keyword-keyword vs. example.com/?id=12345).

6. In contrast to the domain name, keywords in a URL should be separated with hyphens (/keyword-keyword, not /keywordkeyword).

7. The closer your keywords appear to the domain name in the URL, the better.

8. Don’t assume you know what words your customers use to describe your offerings – do your research. Use keyword tools.

9.  Compare and combine results from multiple keyword tools.

10. Do a competitive analysis of the SERPs for your top keywords – who is ranking and how can you compete?

11. Don’t neglect the “long tail” – longer keywords that are lower volume, but less competitive and more specific.

12. Use your keyword close to the beginning of the body text of a page.

13. Use Google Trends to find keywords/topics that are spiking in volume.

14. The suggestions that pop up when you start typing in Google are a great source of keyword ideas too.

15. Have clear goals in mind before you start doing SEO.

16. Have some baseline metrics in place to measure progress against.

17. Don’t make changes you won’t be able to undo, in case anything has a negative effect on rankings or traffic.

18. Get friendly with an analytics application.

19. Google Analytics is free and covers the basics.

20. Put someone in charge of monthly or even weekly reporting to track performance (traffic, links, rankings for top keywords, etc.).

Give it time. SEO is an ongoing process, not a quick fix.

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