When it comes to SEO for small businesses, most folks with a basic gist of SEO understand that it has something to do with making sure your web page has keywords on it, and that they are in certain places.  While this is definitely a component of search engine optimization, it’s actually not the biggest factor in your ranking.

Google cares, more than anything else, about WHO is linking to your site.  Yes, the busy little indexing spiders are watching out for the no-nos like keyword stuffing, spamming, etc.. When it comes down to your final resting place in the search results, you really need other websites linking to your site.

To put it simply, if you have a website selling paint brushes and there are 10 websites out there that think you are awesome and are linking to you – those are 10 great inbound links.  If your competitor sells the same paint brushes, has an equally well made website, but has 100 people who think they are awesome and link to them, guess who’s site will appear first in the search results?

Getting links takes work.  There isn’t a slick piece of software or a killer service that will get you tons of backlinks for a few bucks.  There are plenty that CLAIM to do this, but please, please, PLEASE beware and do not fall for this.  You will end up paying for loads of spammy backlinks and could very well get yourself penalized by the big G.  We’ll talk more about some creative ways to find and get great backlinks in the next installment.

4 days left to get your act together for the new year.  Let’s face it, you’re not getting much work done this week anyway.  It’s a great time to do some planning, and to help you out we put together a list of Top 10 SEO Tips for 2012.  This “To Do” list will have [...]

Happy Holidays from SEOTilt.com!  We hope you all had a merry Christmas and wish you a safe and happy New Year!  Today We want to talk about Local SEO.  Local SEO is a subject which is surrounded by a lot of discussion and confusion.  What makes an effective local SEO Strategy?  The truth is, there [...]

HubSpot put out another valuable ebook today highlighting trends in social media usage.  This chart shows that 7 in 10 businesses that engage in social media promotion plan on INCREASING budgets for SEO.  Less than half of the respondents planned on increasing budgets for online advertising.  The study was done by Social Media Examiner.   [...]

Hubspot just put out a fine little (17 pages) ebook titled How to Increase Awareness and Generate Leads with Local SEO.  This one covers the recent (Nov 2010) change in Google Local from the “7-pack” to the “o-pack” and how that affects local SEO.  There are a lot of good tips for optimizing your Google [...]

Small businesses win because they adapt quickly to the market.  Easily changing the content on your website to reflect your growing business is vital if you are going to get high Google rankings.

Sometimes we just can’t say it better than it has already been said.  SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO is phenomenal.   It’s visually appealing, in layman’s terms, and spot-on.

SEO Tips For Blog Posts Social Media Examiner has a great post which lists 21 Dangerous Blogging Mistakes (and how to fix them).  A couple of the mistakes have to do with SEO . . . #20: Sacrificing keyword-rich titles for cleverness Many bloggers sacrifice keyword-rich titles for clever, attention-grabbing headlines they feel might share better [...]

Jon Jantsch has some fantastic points in Monday’s “Duct Tape Marketing” post titled 5 Types of Content That Every Business Must Employ. This easy categorization of marketing content addresses the fact that there are many different vehicles through which you convey messages to your prospective customer.  All of them should work together toward the elimination [...]

Is blogging worth it?  Can I determine my blog ROI?  Yes you can.  We’ll help.  With real numbers. It’s the middle of summer and if you’re like a lot of us, you have some dirt under your nails from the backyard garden. As it turns out, there are a lot of similarities between your blog, [...]