Running a business can be a difficult venture for many reasons, however one of the hardest challenges for a local business is to get recognized by its target market. With fierce competition in California, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the many ways to cut through the noise and reach your target customers without spending a small fortune to do it. Search Engine Optimization has a lot of benefits for local businesses, it helps drive traffic to the web, is cost-effective, and can be done by just about anyone given who is willing to put in the time and effort and spend a weekend learning about the finer points of SEO. Why Choose SEO? At this point you might be asking, “why should I use SEO for my business?”. The answer is simple, with just a small daily time investment, you can have results on the first pages of search engines like google and yahoo. If you have an online store, your sales could grow exponentially as the number of hits you receive through search engine traffic grows with your SEO practices over time. The best part is, all of this can cost you literally nothing; there are no programs you NEED to buy, no seminars you HAVE to attend, the information is available for free on the web. All you have to do is be willing to put in a little bit of time every day at SEO to see considerable returns. This form of marketing is especially important in crowded markets. In states like California, SEO can help cut through the noise of other local competition, as well as open your small niche store to a wide internet market. How does SEO Work? In a nut-shell, search engines determine how to rank pages by relevance using specific keywords. Your goal is to optimize your site in such a way that the search engine’s will pick up on the key words you target and rank them higher in terms of relevance. For example, if your business sold motorcycle accessories, you may want to target keywords such as “motorcycle helmets” or “motorcycle jackets”. After that is complete you begin the journey of improving the SEO of your site, before long searching “motorcycle helmets” will return your website on the first page, dramatically increasing your traffic. So what do you need to do? Once you have made the decision to go after SEO as a form of marketing you will have to take a few steps. The first thing you will need to do is pick out a few keywords, these are words that people looking to buy your products and services are likely to search for. From here there are two things you need to work on, On-site factors and Off-site factors. On-Site Factors On-site factors include things like including the keyword and secondary keywords in articles, titles and even the URL of your site. You will want to aim for a two to five percent occurrence of these words, as any more and you risk being labeled as a “keyword stuffer” which can hurt your relevance rank. You will also want to make sure your website is easy to navigate, and that there is a way to get to every page from any other page. This step is usually best handled by a website development team, though if you are willing to put in the time and research, it can be done by hand. Finally you will want to make consistent updates on your website using the keywords in them. Search engines tend to rank fresh content as higher ranking, so the more frequently you update, the better your score will tend to be. Off-Site Factors There are a number of off-site factors that improve your score, though most experts agree that the only one that truly matters is the number of back-links. In the world of SEO “back-links” are as important as a good location is for a brick and mortar store. A back-link is simply just a website that links back to your page. Search engines see these links and think “If all these sites are linking back to it, it must be relevant!”. The problem is, generating back-links can be incredibly time consuming, and there aren’t many places to get them yourself without emailing the webmaster of other sites. However, if you are serious about your business, spending an hour or so a day creating back links on blogs and forums that follow your niche is a great way to get started. You can also export the work out to third party companies to save time, though the work is generally best done by yourself or employees you train specifically for the task. With just a little bit of research and practice, and a small time investment every day, your traffic will increase exponentially as you continue to do SEO functions for your site. With a top ranked page in google you will no longer have to worry about if you are reaching the right customers with your marketing efforts as they will begin to come to you. Performing SEO can help with crowded markets such as New York and California, SEO should really be seen as the only option in these places.