Before you spend any more money on an expensive pay per click campaign to advertise your business, consider these 5 simple steps that will optimize your small business website to attract targeted and engaged customers who want to do business with you.

One of the most basic and fundamental places to start is with your website. It must have the right keywords and structure in order to get more online visitors. Many small business owners ignore this task because they are too busy, don’t want to pay their web designer to do it or don’t know how to do it.

Simply put, your website needs to be structured so that the search engines can find it and humans can easily understand and navigate it.

First, good keyword research is a must! Look for those long tail keywords that will bring in targeted traffic to your site. One easy and simple way to do that is to include the name of your city or town in each title of your page. So, if you’re a plumber, write a page that’s called "best plumber in anytown Florida". That’s how your title will appear on Google’s search engine pages. How many people do you think will click on that?

The next step is to create and upload good content to your site that includes those long tail keywords and make sure it all links together in an organized way so that the search engines can index your page properly and so that your human visitors can find what they are looking for. This is called SEO, or search engine optimization, and this is the best investment you can make by hiring someone who knows how to do this properly.

Once your website is ready with good keywords and content, promote it online with Facebook and Twitter. It’s very simple to create a business fan page for your site on Facebook. Post good content to your fan page regularly so that people will be engaged with your business events and offerings. Adding Twitter to the mix is a good idea and make sure you’re following people who are part of your industry or interest. Learn how to use social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.ici.ous and Stumbleupon so that you can drive traffic to your website.

Your next step should include a method to gather names and email addresses on your site so you can contact your customers regularly with special offers and discounts. Collect names at your store by offering your customers freebies or discounts if they sign up. Also, offer those freebies or discounts to your potential customers online who may have never even heard of your website before.

Finally, establish a regular schedule of email marketing to your customers and clients. Start with a monthly newsletter where you send out useful and valuable content and always include a coupon or special. You don’t have to make this a long newsletter. Simply tell them what’s new, provide value and provide a link back to your site to read more about it.

Did you notice that most of these strategies are free or very low cost? You can create a website and host it for about $200 a month. Email marketing software can be free or less than $100 a month, depending on how many subscribers you have signed up. You don’t need to spend money on banners or other online advertising to have an effective online strategy.