A lot of people come to believe that you can compete with any site on the Internet for that top stop on Google no matter when you have started your website as long as you pay a good SEO professional to get the job done. The truth of the matter is even the best SEOs may not be able to get your site to the top of search engines if you have just started today and you are in a superhyper competitive market.

These days more than anything SEO is all about picking your battles. You may choose to choose a very broad term and use that as your main target keyword for your SEO campaign, but I promise you there is more disappointment in the horizon with that strategy than going after the long tail of search. Now if you are a huge company who have had a site for 10 or 12 years and have over a million customers, then you should probably be competing for those high positions.

The strategy is simply different when you are working with a very small business. For small businesses, it’s often better to go after niche searches and avoid getting into a war with the top guys unless you are an ambitious startup and are the hottest thing in the market. So here is my approach to helping small business get ranked high on search engines:

• Pick the right keywords: Pick keywords that are not too broad or too general. The phrase “small business credit card” or “cash back rewards credit card” gives you a better chance of getting ranked on Google than the word “credit card.” Even the two mentioned phrases are extremely competitive, but that’s due to the landscape of the financial industry where there are millions of affilites with valuable and sometimes useless sites who are trying to get ranked for every combination of keywords possible.
• Get the basics right: I can’t tell you how many times I have talked to SEO professionals who want to take shortcuts and do Web 2.0 marketing. Social media should absolutely be in your plans. You should have a content strategy for Digg, YouTube, Reddit, and Delicious. But you can’t not optimize your title tag and expect things to work out because you are doing Web 2.0 marketing. Web 2.0 is cute and can be very powerful but sometimes it’s just too cute.
• Don’t forget linking: Having the right linking strategy can be the difference between being on the first page and first on the second page. The difference may not look huge to you, but believe me it is. Once you are on the first page, you are going to be seen by a lot of people even if you are on position #9 or #10. But the 2nd page requires an extra click and people are very frugal when it comes to spending clicks. Get the right anchor texts from the right relevant sites, and you are on your way.
• Don’t forget automation: I love the old school method of doing everything by hands. Finding out how many backlinks you have by hands, and finding the number of indexed pages manually. It’s great. It reminds you how hard things used to be done before we got SEO tools such as Web Position, WordTracker, and … I am sure a few of you think of people who lived years ago and didn’t have cars. But I doubt you actually go to work with a horse to see how things used to be (actually you might want to do it with the gas prices skyrocketing). Use the tools. Time is indeed money.
• Don’t forget analytics: a few years ago, you could have argued that analytics is expensive, useless, or both to your business. Not anymore. If you want to have any chance of converting better and competing with the big boys, you can’t afford to do marketing the blind way. You can’t guess things or go with things that feel good. You need to track and test, and I am not just talking about pay per click marketing. You should test your SEO pages all the time. Change the way the copy is written. Move things around. Pick the keywords that actually do convert. What’s the benefit of ranking for the term “credit cards” if its conversion rate is 0.00001%. Basically out of each 100,000 people, you get one person who applies for your card. That’s terrible. Now, it could be that your site is so scary it drives people away. But you wouldn’t know it unless you have a good SEO analytics package in place. Google Analytics is for free. Go get it. No excuses!

In a shocking turn of events, Microsoft bought Google today with a tempting $500 per share offer which left the search world staggered to say the least. Microsoft was involved in a messy back and forth fight with Yahoo! over the acquisition of the company, but they finally got it right by buying what matters. Microsoft gave Google executives a portable Zune 2.0 device to help them listen to Steve Ballmer’s Geeks gone wild podcast, everyday.

This event will mark the day Microsoft finally got it right and grabbed the sole majority of the search market. Congress will not block this deal as No. 3 taking over No. 1 certainly does not raise any anti-trust issues.

In other news, today’s April 1st.

I did this experiment the other day to figure out how long it would take for a site to get indexed on Google. I basically went to 1&1.com and registered a brand new domain. Then I put a blog on it, and wrote an article about Amazon Kindle. Then I submitted it to Digg. Once it got a few votes, I was sure that I would be indexed rather quickly, but how quickly you might ask: 2 days. Actually the whole process took two days, from domain registration to getting indexed on Google. I wonder if anyone has managed this in a shorter period of time. What does the guinness book of records say?

I remember when I started my journey into the world of search engine optimization. I was a few years younger (not giving up my age that easilyJ) and probably naïve a little bit. I had read a few SEO books, and I felt quite confident about my ability to concoct and implement SEO strategies for my clients. My background was in computer science, and I used to be hardcore programmer before moving to the business side of things. So I felt confident coding and recoding pages in order to optimize them for search engines. Let’s say things were “simple” then.

One I got my first opportunity in the corporate world, I was excited and willing to make something happen as soon as possible. But that’s when things started to look not so “simple” after all. There were many issues that I had to face in order to implement the simplest SEO strategy. It wasn’t the matter of writing the code and putting it on our corporate page any more. That’s what you learn from the books. But the real world experience is much different. Not only you need to know your SEO stuff, you need to find a way to get others units within your organization involved in your SEO “movement.” You are more than likely to face some resistance at first. Your IT team might not necessarily be willing to put time into something that doesn’t show some tangible results immediately. In addition, the IT team is often bombarded with a bunch of projects, and they may not like you to have more work for them to do. Besides, with all the work on their plate, your IT professionals may not be willing to give your SEO plan a high priority. That’s when you get into a FIFO or LILO situation (first in first out).   But having said all that, you can get your IT on board pretty quickly once you educate them on why SEO matters. IT professionals are smart people and would like to have some input in what you do, but they will not resist your plan once they know why you are doing what you are doing. Of course having a “process” would be helpful.

The most challenging part of corporate SEO is dealing with executives who know next to nothing about search engines and talk only in numbers and future strategies. If your company is on the acquisitions side of things, then the only thing that would matter is how you can get more customers and generate more sales. The fact that your SEO plan takes a few weeks or months to show full results would not make executives happy. At the same time, executives would be interested to know how much budget they need to allocate for your SEO plan, and who needs to do what. In essence, you should be able to come out and say that your SEO plan takes this many hours, this many people will be involved, and this will be our ROI if things go according to plan. Of course, with SEO, it’s hard to quantify your ROI upfront, but that’s part of the game when you are a corporate SEO. You probably will face the same questions as an SEO consultant, but being a consultant is much different than being a full time employee and having executives micromanaging what you do and breathing down your neck. So it turns out, search engine optimization is not all that rosy in the real world. But who said you should believe what you read in books.