I have been a small business marketing consultant for over 30 years. The fact is your customers buying habits have changed. Consumers today turn to the Internet to conduct product research prior to purchase 89% of the time. Does that mean traditional media is dead? Not at all! Many consumers will turn to newspapers just before purchase to look for discounts, of course they still watch TV and listen to the radio. Although with easy access to news, commercial free music through their electronic devises and TiVo consumers only view commercials when they choose to. Today’s small business needs to track everything! Add tracking phone numbers and have unique offers in every ad you run so you know what is not producing the desired results. Once you understand this take the nonproductive ad spend and put it into Internet marketing.

With that said it is imperative the small business person understands Internet marketing to be successful! My mission is to EMPOWER all Small businesses to achieve maximum prosperity free! What are the Small Business SEO secrets to beat your competition to the top of the search results? This short but powerful article will reveal the Small Business SEO secrets to a marketing a business today!

First you need to understand your competitors and why they are on top of search results. Go download and install a browser plugin call SEO Quake. Then go to Google and do a search for the keyword phrases you think your potential customer would use to when searching for the product or service you would like to sell them. You will now find a plethora of new information appearing under every listing. Start a spreadsheet and jot down the top 4 websites , the keyword phrase you used, their PR rating, the age of the domain, how many links they have and if you click on the backlinks hyperlink you will see who is linking to them (save that to your favorites so you can go back to get links to the higher PR sites yourself). Do this for all the keyword phrase you would like to be in the top of the search engines for.

For the next part you should open a free Google account. If you already have one login and go to Google’s Keyword Tool. Paste the websites you collected into the website box to show what keywords your competition is going after. Sort by local searches and download the list. Delete any keywords with under 1000 searches per month. Next look over the list and for keywords with buying signals and mid-range competition.

Next we need to understand how many websites you are competition against you for the keywords you want to target. Do a search for the keyword phrases with over 1000 searches a month but with quotes „keyword phrase“ around it. This will reveal how many websites have an exact match focus for that keyword. Now you are looking for keyword phrases with under 30,000 exact match small business SEO competing websites. When you are finished with all this you should have a short list of highly targeted keyword phrases with over 1000 searches a month and under 30,000 small business SEO competing websites.

The next part of your Small Business SEO strategy is to take you keyword list and do a search for a bulk domain registration site. A bulk domain registration site will allow you to paste in your list of keywords and show you which have .com, .org or .net domain available. If you are able to get a domain with an exact match to your targeted keyword it will give you a huge Small Business SEO advantage over your competition! Use the other keywords to create categories on your site. Write 300 to 500 word articles focused on each keyword repeating the keyword phrase once for every 100 words. Use your keyword phrase in the page title, description and image alt tags. After you have built your site ping each article at Ping.fm, social bookmark each article. If you are collecting e-mail addresses (which you should) open an account with Aweber.

Now on to offsite Small Business SEO. You need to create one way keyword specific links going back to your site. Each link from other sites represents a vote to the search engines that your site should be listed for that specific keyword phrase. To do this start writing articles every week with the same keyword focus of the article on your site and submit them to the article directories. Each article should have your keyword hyperlinked back to the article it is promoting 2 times. Create blogs on Blogger, HubPages and WordPress. Create a Squidoo lens. Put together some videos and submit them to TubeMogul free who will submit them to the video sites like YouTube. Start a Facebook account and a business fan page. If you do all this yourself it is free but you can hire someone to do this for you.

If you are a local business make sure you submit your site to the local directories of Google, Yahoo and Bing. There are also tons of free Directories, Yellow Pages, Local Search Engines, Local Business Listings, and Local Networks you should add your business listing too. A shortcut to getting listed on the popular business portals just submit to InfoUSA and SuperPages as they supply listings to many of the major local business portals.

For free step by step training and tools to automate the whole process plus every Internet Marketing secret in existence please become a member of my free Small Business SEO site. Go to Small Business SEO and watch your business soar!