Small Business Website Design & Small Business SEO
Even with fewer hours spent on small business website design, every design is unique to a company. The foundation remains, through reinforcing a company's corporate brand on the web.
As a small business, a search engine optimization campaign can be very beneficial, but costly to implement. Pay Per Click Advertising is often a more efficient use of your money, but it won't help you at all with your organic listings.
The best option with a limited budget is usually a combination of the two. Start by using PPC to get visitors to your site. In the mean time, learn as much as you can about SEO and make sure that your site is at least search engine friendly. Even if you aren't adding new content or engaging in a link building campaign, you want to make sure the spiders can crawl your site and accurately index the content that is already there.
As you learn more, you'll be able to apply your knowledge bit by bit. As your business grows, you can make SEO a bigger part of your marketing initiatives and see increased benefits from it. Where do you start?
| Small Business Web Site Design |
 | | Al Beau Stud Services Dracut, Massachusetts(MA) | retail- consumer |  | | Art Institute - Corporate Chicago, Illinois (IL) | education/training |  | - small business website design
| Aspen University Denver, Colorado (CO) | education/training |  | - website design
- search engine optimization
| Bay Area Kitchen & Windows San Francisco, California (CA) | home improvement |  | - SEO web site redesign
- identity & logo
| Buyer One Westford, Massachusetts | real estate |  | - small business website design
| Capella University Minneapolis, Minnesota (MN) | education/training |  | | Chubb Computer Institute - Corporate Teaneck, New Jersey (NJ) | education/training |  | - web design
- search engine optimization
| DavTech Plating Marlboro, Massachusetts | manufacturing- contract |  | - small business website design
| Devry Institute Minneapolis, Minnesota (MN) | education/training |  | - web site redesign
- search engine optimization
| Direct VIP Las Vegas, Nevada (NV) | financial |  | | Disabilities Books Boston, Massachusetts | retail- consumer |  | - small business website design
- search engine optimization
| Electronic Products Danvers, Massachusetts | manufacturing- contract |  | - web design
- search engine optimization
| Eurotherm Billerica, Massachusetts | manufacturing- heavy |  | - small business web redesign
| Fortunato's Restaurant Lowell, Massachusetts | leisure |  | - website design
- search engine optimization
| Garlic Bistro Chelmsford, Massachusetts | leisure |  | | Golden Gate University San Francisco, California (CA) | education/training |  | - small business website design
- search engine optimization
| HR Hotline Concord, New Hampshire | business services |  | | Interstate Graphics & Display Reading, Pennsylvania (PA) | manufacturing- materials |  | | ITT Technical Institute New York, NY | education/training |  | - website design
- search engine optimization
| Ogden Wells Tewksbury, Massachusetts | home improvement |  | - small business website design
| Park Avenue Development Chelmsford, Massachusetts | real estate |  | - website design
- search engine optimization
| Pine Properties Lowell, Massachusetts | real estate |  | | R/E-Max Lowell, Massachusetts | real estate |  | - web design
- search engine optimization
| Slingshot Dedham, Massachusetts | software/telecom |  | - small business website design
- flash movie design
| Statspin - Vet Division Norwood, Massachusetts | manufacturing- materials |  | | Token Sales Lowell, Massachusetts | entertainment |  | | University Alliance San Bernadino, California (CA) | education/training |  | | Westford China Nashua, New Hampshire | retail- consumer |  | | Winco Identification Nashua, New Hampshire | manufacturing- materials |  | - small business website design
- web engineering
| World Tech Consultants Amherst, New Hampshire | business services |
|
View more small business website design
Where Do You Start?
There is some good information that is freely available on the web, along with a lot of really bad information. People love to find one example and claim it is the way things happen asa rule. Be careful of what you read, especially in forums, which are notorious for inaccurate info. Keep your eyes open, experiment, and you'll be amazed at how much you'll learn.
Basic Elements of an SEO Campaign
Keyword Research for Small Business
It's important to know what terms people are using to try to find the products and services you offer. Several tools exist to help you with this process, and each offer their own unique take. Using a combination of a couple of them will often give you the most complete picture of the keywords that are being used and their approximate search volume. We've found WordZe to be one of the best paid tools currently on the market.
On-Page Optimization
Once you've figured out the right terms to target, you'll want to go through and start optimizing each page for its relevant keywords. This will involve changing the title tag, meta tags, headers and text. It's important to have unique titles and meta descriptions for every page of your site. This step helps the search engines know exactly what your page is about. If you don't have time, consider hiring an SEO expert to build landing pages and articles for you.
Small Business Content Creation
Search engines love fresh content. Set up a schedule for adding content and stick to it, regardless if it's once a day, week, month, whatever. The more the better, but make sure you are adding quality to you site, not just fluffy thin pages that have little value to your users.
Link Building
The links pointing to your site from other sites is arguable the most important factor in how well your small business site ranks for a given term. You'll want to leverage any relationships you have, get a link from your family, friends, business partners, etc. Also look into authority sites that let you set up a subdomain and get some links that way.
Technical Issues for Small Businesses
This is an area that is unknowingly hurting a lot of websites. You'll want to check to make sure you aren't blocking the robots from crawling your site in your robots.txt file. You'll also want to make sure you are only serving up the www or non-www version of the site. If you can access both, this can create problems in the search engines.
Get the SEO basics mastered and you will be well on your way to free traffic via good rankings in the organic search results.
Inspect Our Client List 
Category: Small Business Website Design & Small Business SEO