Seven quick and easy tips for small business owners to improve their search engine rankings.

1. Seven quick and easy tips to improve search engine Rankings Greg Bray, President, Blue Tangerine Solutions www.BlueTangerineSolutions.com November 10, 2009

2. What is Search Engine Optimization? Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. -Wikipedia

3. Important Reminders Site Visitors come first. Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process, not a one time event. Each Search Engine is slightly different. What works for one will not necessarily work for another. Search Engines are always changing. A successful ranking today can disappear in the future. A given page on your site (such as the home page) cannot be successfully optimized for every possible keyword of interest.

4. How Visitors See the Page

5. How Search Engines See the Page

6. What Site Owners Want to See

7. Thinking like a Search Engine Goal: To return valid and relevant search results. Challenge: How do we figure out the message and purpose of a particular page? Keywords on the page. Keywords in the titles and headings. Keywords in links that point to the page. Number and quality of other sites that link to the page.

8. 7 Quick and Easy SEO Tips Monitor and measure top keywords Avoid duplicate page content penalties Include keywords in content Include keywords in the html title tag and in the link tags Seek out links from other Web sites Create an HTML and XML Sitemap Submit your site to the top engines and directories

9. Tip 1: Monitor and Measure Google Analytics - google.com/analytics Google Webmaster Tools - google.com/webmasters/tools Google Alerts – google.com/alerts Yahoo Site Explorer Tools - siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com Yahoo Alerts - alerts.yahoo.com

10. Tip 2: Avoid Duplicate Pages Search Engines will penalize pages that appear to be exact duplicates of each other. Pages should be at least 20%-30% different. Biggest risk for duplication comes when using multiple domain names for the same site. www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com can be seen as different sites. Pick a primary domain and have all other domains redirect to that one.

11. Tip 3: Include Keywords in Content If the keyword isn’t on the page, then you can’t expect to rank for it. Search engines can not see keywords that are part of images, generated by javascript functions, or part of Flash elements. Need to focus on top keywords for a given page. Too many different keywords becomes the same as no keywords.

12. Tip 4: Keywords in title and link tags Most important keyword location is the html <title> tag. Shows up in browser title bar Shows up in favorites May show up in search results Make unique across pages Keywords in links describe help indicate what the linked to page is about.

13. Tip 5: Seek out links from other sites Think of a link from another site as a recommendation. You want to be recommended by sites that are considered important. Google PageRank

14. Tip 6: Create HTML and XML Sitemaps Sitemaps help search engines find all of the pages on your site Especially important if your site is large or has more than 3 levels www.sitemaps.org

15. Tip 7: Submit your Site Obvious! But often overlooked. Main Search Engines: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Bing Top Directories: www.dmoz.org Yahoo Directory ($299 per year) Products: www.google.com/base Real Estate: Zillow.com Trulia.com

16. New SEO Services

17. Special Offer 20% discount on setup fee to first three new SEO clients. Contact: info@BlueTangerineSolutions.com Offer expires November 30, 2009.