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!