Search Engine Optimisation for Small Business

The experience of one woman, Jill Caren, in getting top rankings for her small business with Google is outlined in this BusinessWeek article. The American woman runs a small business called “Expressions Photo Design, and ilovephotogifts.com, her Web site, regularly lands among the first listings for anyone Googling ‘unique photo gifts,’ the keywords she thinks potential customers are using in searches.”With a previous website, Caren wasn’t so lucky and her website designer was of no use. So she “took an SEO class online and started hanging out in online SEO forums. Pretty soon, she says, ‘I decided to redo my site entirely. Instead of leaving it up to someone else, I did it myself, and I could not be happier with the results.'”Eight months of learning what needed to be changed and how to do it, Caren launched her new website “June, 2007, and attributes a 21% increase in her annual sales, to about $80,000, to the relaunch. ‘In less than three months,’ she says, ‘I was on the first page of Google for many of my keywords.’ Now she doesn’t do any advertising and is able to rely solely on search to bring in business. Here’s how she does it.”On domain names, Caren says “your URL should specify exactly what you sell. Search engines look for keywords in a domain name that are related to the products or services a user is searching for.”To read this BusinessWeek article in full, see businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_66/s0806026852445.htm.