Every month I receive a few enquiries from small businesses who don’t really understand what SEO is, but they know it’s important and want to find-out more… until a price is mentioned and then they run for the hills.

This isn’t because our SEO prices are outlandish - the client simply doesn’t understand how keyword research, link building, tweaking their page structure, adding more content and interacting with social media will somehow get more people looking at (and hopefully purchasing from) their website.

Instead of putting the hard-sell on these clients, I encourage them to save their money and try a few things for themselves.

Keyword Research

The first step is to perform some keyword research. This will ensure you’re targeting the right terms that will generate the best traffic for your site. Here’s our 4 Step Guide to Keyword Research which explains the process quite clearly as well as pointing you to a bunch of free tools that will help make the process easier.

Website Audit

After you have your keywords chosen, it’s time to incorporate them into your website content. Whilst you’re doing this, have a read through these 10 On-Site SEO Tips which will help identify the most important areas to focus on when you’re updating your site.

Social Media

If the term ‘Social Media’ is foreign to you, have a look at the Beginners Guide to Social Media. If you know what Social Media is and you simply haven’t done anything about it, then these 7 Reasons To Embrace Social Media might make you change your mind.

Even if you decide not to interact with online communities or other Social Media sites, at least think about adding a blog to your site.

Blogs are a great way to continually add new content to your site; they attract regular readers who’ll keep coming back to see what’s new and what’s even better is that some of these readers will have their own blogs or websites - which means they’re likely to link to you if you write interesting content.

Link Building

When one website links to another, it’s the online equivalent of a personal referral. It’s like one website saying “hey, have a look at this site… it’s got some great information that pertains to what you’re currently reading”.

Whilst this sounds pretty simple, getting people to link to your website can be a lot trickier than it sounds. Here are some basic Link building techniques (along with some tips about what people often forget to mention when discussing the topic). Don’t forget that it isn’t just the quantity of links, but also the quality of those links.

Local Search

Another method of gaining a few more links and attracting some quality local traffic is by listing your site with some targeted local directories.

If you aren’t familiar with the search industry, you may not realise that the search engines return results based on your geographic location. The article Localised Search talks more about the topic and for slightly more advanced reading, 7 Geo Targeting SEO Tips explains how to use this to your advantage.

Other Resources

Good search results are a trade-off between money and time. If you don’t have the budget to hire a professional search engine optimisation company, then you’ll need to put in the time and effort to learn how to do SEO for yourself.

With a world wide web full of free and useful information, there’s no reason that you can’t achieve top rankings - it will just take a bit longer than paying someone to do it for you.

Here are some other excellent resources to have a look at:

• Search Engine Land
• SEOBook
• SEOmoz
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Sphinn

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