The Small Business SEO series is a 3 component series that identifies and briefly explains the main factor components of an effective small business SEO campaign. Part 1 in this series relates to keyword research and monitoring methods. Parts 2 and 3 deal with on-page optimization of websites as well as off-page elements respectively.

In recent years, Small Business SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, has emerged as the best popular and powerful marketing and advertising option for small and medium sized businesses. The reason for this is obvious, SEO done effectively and regularly can provide the maximum return on investment of any other type of marketing accessible to the small business owner. As the pace of technology increases more as well as more people are going to the internet and search engines for shopping and research. Other types of "traditional" small small business advertising such as magazines, yellow page advertising, newsletters, brochures, and magazine placements have witnessed a pointed decline in ROI and performance in current years. Small business people have recognized this and are spending increasingly more in their marketing efforts and finances on SEO as well as other forms of internet marketing. This article talks about in general terms the process involved in running an effective Seo campaign.

A successful small company SEO campaign typically begins with market and keyword research. This step, through shortage of knowledge of it's significance, is sometimes not really provided a lot of attention by seo newcomers. Seo Professionals know that investing some timein keyword research is certainly required and will pay-off when it comes to better results and Return on investment. Keyword research is basically the process of identifying the keywords and phrases that it is the most sense to target within the Search engine optimization campaign. The first step in keyphrase research is to determine all the keywords that might be employed for a specific business. After this, an analysis should be made of the competition for this key word as well as potential search traffic. The result of this analysis is usually to identify the keywords that have good traffic and and low levels of competition. In Search engine optimization terminology these are referred to as "low hanging fruit" and will be the words which are targeted and which the remaining portion of the SEO campaign is focused upon. There are a variety of tools and software programs for performing this research and analysis. The google adwords keyword tool is a no cost tool that can be very helpful for identifying keywords and analyzing competition. Many people in the SEO community employ a variety of paid software for keyword examination.

The next step is to ascertain baseline website visitors and search positions and also to setup some kind of method to monitor outcomes as well as progress in search positions and site visitors from seo efforts. Most web hosting providers provide a free statistics program as part of their service. Google analytics is also a free program that can be used to measure and track traffic and web analytics. Either way, some type of analytics program should be put in place to measure and track visitors increases and also evaluate the success of the Web optimization campaign. In addition internet search engine positioning can and really should be tracked as well as checked. There are some free tools available for this however the more effective software are paid tools such as Rank Tracker which usually tend to be used by SEO analysts.

After the primary keyphrase research is completed, the highest potential keywords chosen, and also traffic and search rankings measurement methods are in position then the subsequent step in the SEO marketing campaign can be begun. The next step in a standard Web optimization strategy, on page optimization, is discussed in Part 2 of this series.