There are literally hundreds of factors that go into search engine optimization, and it’s difficult for most people to think about all of them.  That’s why companies are hired to perform SEO services, because they have the know-how and experience to get people ranked. Small businesses usually don’t have the resources to hire someone who’s going to do a great job for them. Like most things in life, you pay for what you get with SEO service providers. These days a lot of small business are trying to be smarter about search on their own. It’s not impossible to teach yourself SEO, if you have the time and desire anyone can learn enough to get by.

The best way for small businesses to increase their visibility online is through frequent and quality search friendly content generation.

They say content is king, and it’s true more than ever online. Generating unique and quality content, regularly, in a way that’s search friendly will provide more value in the long run than anything else. Think of the Internet as a spider’s web (duh!), and a single website occupies a small section of that web. The larger an individual website is, the more surface area it will take up and the more chance a fly has of landing on it. Everyday millions of flies search the World Wide Web, and the larger your portion of the Web the more traffic you’re going to get.

Of course, this takes a while to start seeing results. Google doesn’t just trust any website. You need to have history and you need to have authority on the whatever it is you or your business is about. Once search engines realize that you aren’t a spammer, that you’re trying to add real value to the world and help others through your content they start to show you love in return. A good portion of it is a volume game, like I said, the more content you have, the more opportunity there is for someone to stumble across your site. You’ll start to see people visiting your site after they’ve typed in some odd looking search terms. If you’ve concentrated on a subject, a theme surrounding those search terms should emerge. These are called ‘long-tail searches’ because they’re made up of more than three words and very few people search for those terms individually. It’s important to realize that, though few searches occur for long-tail terms individually, there are more people using long-tail terms as a whole than there are short-tail searches. They can really add up, but only if you’ve done your job right. More on that later …

Good content has great side effects too. With how easy it is for people to share information there’s a good chance a decent blog post will get passed around through email. Or maybe a colleague will post it on their Facebook profile, or perhaps someone submits it to Digg.

If you don’t swing the bat you’ll never hit the ball. Don’t over analyze, just do it. Just write and good things will come.

Next up … automating content generation by empowering users and enforcing SEO best practices.  What was that!?  Sheesh … sign up with WordPress and start a blog already!