Operating a small business in today’s economy places you up against stiff competition from big business and corporations. Any small business must have a plan and implement strategies to secure, retain and grow its’ market-share. One major drawback to this is funding and business capital. Generally the big budgets for marketing and advertising are just not there with small to medium sized businesses and startups.

One of the key points of any campaign is repetition, getting your name, brand, and/or product out there and recognizable. Repetition involves making the investment to at times do the same things over and over again to produce strong results. Long growth curves, expensive repetition of expenses to generate a growing business and extended profitability creation are not strong points for a business owner and often difficult if not impossible to commit too and stick with.

Instead, they will need to develop other ways to promote their brand/product/service without spending a huge amount of money to achieve it. The most cost effective way with the greatest impact and reach to achieve this is through search engine optimization or SEO for short.

Keep in mind that anyone can build a Website, but a Website does not generate traffic and build an audience just because it is on the web. Optimized content that appeals to a certain audience and is actively targeted to reach them is key.

There are several key factors why SEO is important for any small business on the web.

It will enable the growing businesses owner to reach out to their target market. Lets face it, yellow page advertising is expensive and ask yourself these two questions.

When was the last time you used the yellow pages instead of a search engine?

Do you even know where in your home or business the yellow pages are kept?

No matter how great your Website might be, it’s worthless if no one ever sees it! SEO, if done effectively, aids and enables you to increase the amount of visitors that frequent your Website, which may increase business and ultimately profits into your business.

SEO is also vital in that it creates opportunity to transform those visitors into customers. This is done through implementation of a spread of different systems beginning with content and ease of usability usually ending up in profit.

Additionally, SEO will help you build your reputation and creates brand recognition by enabling your site name and links to be put in front of countless potential customers via search engine results. When you take the time to properly optimize your Internet site it will increase your overall user experience and customer loyalty if the transaction is handled properly. Similarly, it helps your visitors find the information that they are looking for quickly and effectively.

Appearing in as many relevant search results on hopefully the first page enables any business to put their name and brand in front of people in places and markets never before available on the worldwide scale that the Internet has created. With E-commerce sales consistently posting positive gains and consistently taking market-share away from brick and mortar based businesses, what business shouldn’t have some sort of web presence?

More often than not, the results far outweigh the expenditure and cost effectiveness vs the cost effectiveness of traditional print marketing cannot even compare. Take the time to prioritize SEO and optimize your Website correctly. The visitors as well as the profit will soon follow.

Furthermore, with SEO you will have the power to influence and at times control your competitors. This is because a well optimized web site will bring more visitors to your Internet site which in turn grows your brand awareness and hopefully increases market-share.

In the end, SEO is certainly essential to small businesses simply because it will help them lower their across-the-board risk. This is due to the fact that our market reach is worldwide, lowering the impact of decreased demand in any one area or region. This is actually one of the more unique and often neglected advantages to SEO.

Advantage Ecommerce Solutions is your total package for E-commerce consulting and market-share domination. Whether you are just establishing your web presence, are in need of design and consulting or are ready for some new strategies to expand your market-share and dominate your competition, we work with any company any size. Schedule your free consultation today and let us show you how we can help.

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© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | Marketing On A Limited Budget With SEO

It does not matter what you call them: vodcasts, vidcasts, videocasting, or video podcasting… there are a few behind-the-scenes actions you can take to help attract more attention to your video productions. Just like websites, it does not matter how amazing the content is if interested people are unable to find it.

Use the following suggestions to help increase the exposure your videos receive…

1. Use Keywords

In Video File Name Insert keywords in the name of the video file. When determining what keywords to use, do not simply rely on intuition; do research, just as you would for a website, to see what relevant terms people are searching on.

2. Create Video Feed

Create an RSS feed of all videos in a collection. Each feed item should contain a different video in the enclosure field. Optimize the feed using related keywords. For additional help, there is a Videocasting Feed Creation Tutorial available at http://www.feedforall.com/videocasting-tutorial.htm .

3. Increase Exposure

Host your videos on YouTube, and embed the video into your website, which will increase the video count on YouTube. The more popular a video seems to be, themore exposure it will receive.

4. Video Name And Description

In the video name and description fields, use keywords that relate to the content of the video. Create a compelling yet relevant title and description that will encourage people to click-through.

5. Google Video Sitemap

Create a video sitemap for the search engines. For details on what to include in such sitemaps, Google has provided specifications in their Google Webmaster Central Blog at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/introducing-video-sitemaps.html .

6. Meta Data

Include meta data in the video file. The newer video search engines will often rely on meta data to produce relevant results. Many video editing products will allow you to edit and customize the meta data associated with the video file, and you should use this the same way you would use the meta data for a webpage.

7. Optimize Landing Page

Optimize the landing page on the website, embed the video in a webpage on your website, and then use standard SEO techniques to optimize that webpage for the search engines. Use keywords that relate to the video on the page that contains the video.

8. Transcripts

Provide a text transcript of the video, both on the landing page and in the RSS feed for the video.

9. Embed URL In Video

Brand the video with your logo in the initial video splash screen, and include your website address on the bottom of the video to increase your brand exposure.

10. Leave Them Wanting More

The video should be a teaser and leave the audience wanting more. Engage the audience, but try to encourage the viewer to visit the website or view other videos to learn more.

11. Submit YouTube Feed

YouTube creates an RSS feed for every user account that is created. In addition to manually creating an RSS feed, you can also use the YouTube feed to promote your videos. The formatting details for the YouTube video feeds can be found at http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/username/uploads (replace “username” in the url with your own YouTube account username).

12. Anchor Text

When linking to the video, use anchor text that contains keywords which relate to the video.

13.Video Submission

Submit the video to all the video websites and video podcast websites. Here are a couple of resource sites to get you started…

Podcast & Video Submissions - http://www.podcasting-tools.com/submit-podcasts.htm

140 Places to Submit Your Video List - http://www.stephanmiller.com/my-link-lists/140-place-to-submit-your-video-list/

14. Tag Video

Tag the video on the video networks with relevant keywords, making it is easier for people to find when they search on those keywords.

15. Track Views

Track and review the number of views that a video receives. If you find that a substantial number of viewers are abandoning the video before completion, the chances are good that the video is too long and could benefit from trimming.

16. Social Bookmarking

Use social bookmarking to draw additional attention to videos. This will also help with the number of incoming links, which in turn will help improve search engine ranking.

Videos are the latest marketing channel. In order to make the most of it, optimize the video and increase the exposure it receives.

About the Author:

Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio

recording and editing software.

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© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | Tips To Optimize Video Podcasts