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Search Engine Optimization – SEO – can be the single most effective way to promote your business online, however small it may be. It is also one of the most cost effective. Pay per click advertising can get you a jump in the Google rankings quickly but once you stop paying your ads disappear, and if you have not made any efforts to create organic SEO you run the risk of becoming invisible to your target audience, the people who are searching Google and Bing right now for a business just like yours.

SEO, when done right, is hard work. After you have optimized your website the process isnt over. Off site SEO, which includes blogging, article creation, developing and maintaining a social media presence and deep link building are all important elements of any SEO campaign that need to be worked on constantly, which can be a difficult task for a small business owner to juggle, given everything else they have to do!

Outsourcing your SEO can solve that problem, but choose your SEO partner carefully. There are a lot of social media “gurus” out there who are really only after one thing – your money. You cannot rank on the first page of Google overnight, or in a week. And there is no magic formula for SEO that can be followed by every business. SEO best practices change all the time, because the way search engines operate changes all the time. Look for an SEO outsourcing partner who can demonstrate that they are up to date on current best practices and who wants to develop an SEO strategy with you, not for you.

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There are an awful lot of SEO specialists out there these days, but some of them are just not quite what they claim to be. Rather than actually keep up with SEO trends, that change every day, they use the same old outdated techniques that don’t work anymore (if they ever did) to rack up those billing hours. In this post we are going to share some of the best SEO secrets these bad SEOs don’t want you know (because it might give them away)

SEO Secret: YOU DO NOT NEED A HUGE WEBSITE TO RANK WELL IN THE SERPS Five unique pages is enough to begin with, quality is far more important than quantity. Add pages only when you have good, original content to populate them with, not because you think you should. Quality always tops quantity, in the eyes of your visitors and of the search bots.

SEO Secret: YOU DO NOT NEED TO SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO GOOGLE. Google will find your site just fine, just give them 7-10 days. Concentrate on making your site appealing to their bots when they arrive rather than paying someone to do something useless.

SEO Secret: YOU DO NOT NEED TO SPEND HOURS WORRYING ABOUT META KEYWORDS. Google admits they have ignored them for years. The meta description is important though, it is your first chance to communicate with searchers, so this is where you should work on creating great stuff. But do so in under 160 characters as that is all that search bots read.

SEO Secrets: TOO MUCH FLASH ANIMATION FRIES A SEARCH BOT’S BRAIN. Sure Flash animations are pretty but they confuse search bots. Keep them to a minimum and add great content instead.

SEO Secrets: SUBMITTING YOUR SITE TO 100′s OF “FREE DIRECTORIES” CAN RUIN ITS REPUTATION.These days many of these sites are havens for spammers and Google and Bing view them as bad. And playing in a bad neighborhood get you tarred with the same brush. Pick a few well ranked ones relevant to your niche and make sure you claim your Google Places listing and optimize it well.

SEO Secrets: BUYING LINKS IS NEVER A GOOD IDEA. Link building is tedious and its hard work, but always worth it in the end. Buying links can get you banned from Google if you get caught.

SEO Secrets: FREE TO USE CONTENT WILL HURT, NOT HELP, YOUR WEBSITE. Lifting content from “free to use” articles sites is lazy and it is very bad SEO practice. It’s almost a cliché now but still true, on the Internet content is king. If you don’t have many writing skills hire someone who does, there are a lot of good content writers out there who still care enough to write great original content specifically for you.

SEO Secrets: ARTICLE SPINNING DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE. Yes you want to get lots of content out onto the web but Google Panda was designed to kill poor content, and that is what spun articles are.

SEO Secrets: SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING WORKS, BUT ITS HARD WORK. Social Media Marketing (SMM) does work, but only if you do it the right way. Scheduling a bunch of self promotional tweets and updates weeks ahead is not the right way to do it. Social media success comes from engaging with your audience and providing them with content and interactions that is valuable, not a stream of spam links. HARD SELLING IS A SOCIAL MEDIA NO NO.

SEO Secrets: YOU NEED AN SEO PARTNER, NOT A GURU. A good SEO provider will want to be your partner, not your guru. Make sure your SEO listens to your voice and your ideas, not just their own.