So many individuals and small businesses out there have taken the plunge into the online world.  In a perfect world once you launched your website your phone would start ringing off the hook with, “We found your company online and would love to do business with you!”.  However we do not live in a perfect world and this does not happen as often as we all would like.  So this post is to get some of you up to speed with some simple SEO tips that you can apply to your own sites to get a little more traffic, generate a few more leads, and ultimately a few more sales for you businesses.

1. Get listed as a business in the major search engines – Google Maps Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, MSN Local Listing Center
2. Write meaningful page titles – This is actually high under-utilized.  I see too many sites’ page titles that read “<insert company name here>” and that’s it.  This is the perfect place to take advantage of geographic and keyword targeting.  For example CWS wants to appeal to the entire Lehigh Valley for web design

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Over my last family vacation I was fortunate enough to see my brother who is getting his PhD in Artificial Intelligence down in Austin at U Texas.  We had spoken previously about setting up a website with some experimental navigation.  So over a handful of hours  collaborating we finally created his personal site for school.

The site navigation is displayed dynamically and is controlled by 1 text file.   I will include a snippet of his site description so you get a better idea of how this site actually functions.

This site employs an experimental content management system, conceived by me and generously implemented by Connected Web Solutions according to my somewhat unconventional specifications. Although I have yet to add much of the content, I wanted to put up a few words about navigating the site right off the bat.

The general idea behind this site is to model it on a Semantic Network. Each page in the site represents a ‘thing’ or ‘concept’ and the links between pages describe ‘relations’ between them. The pages in this site, like nodes in a semantic net, are not restricted to the kind of tree structure often used in a website. Instead they are

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I would like to mention the importance of conferences for someone in the web/tech world here in this post. I was fortunate enough to attend South-by-Southwest (SXSW) last year and had an unbelievable experience. I was able to listen to the big-wigs of the industry speak at various panels and key-notes. I was even lucky enough to speak personally with Tim Ferriss (4 Hour Work Week, author), Frank Warren (Post Secret, creator) and Tony Hsieh (Zappos.com, CEO). The most important and beneficial parts of the conference were the time between the lectures and panels. I was able to meet, network, and speak with so many different kinds of people surrounding, not only the web world, but film and music people as well. I was able to relate to them with similar interests in anything from running a company to how the new Nokia cell phone could stream live video to the web. I was also fortunate enough to bump into a college classmate of mine, Rob Sandie, that turned out to be…

CWS has clients spread throughout the northeast. A certain one of these clients is about 100 miles away. We provide them with office hours twice a week which ends up being about 6 hours of driving weekly…without traffic. Regardless of how much music is on your iPod you can only sing Britney Spears hits for so long.

Here is where podcasting has completely changed my life and my business. I have found a podcast for almost every facet of my life and business. So if you find yourself stuck in a boring commute, download some of these podcasts. From current web design news to reviews of the latest indy movies and upcoming videogame releases…you can find what you want from one of these.

Boag World

THE BEST WEB DESIGN PODCAST! I wish I found this before I started my company. Hosts, Paul Boag & Marcus Lillington, have a vast knowledge of the web industry and business. Running a web design firm, writing contracts, getting more work as a freelancer, conferences, being a pop-star in the 80s, etc. That list could go on forever. Thanks to their recommendation I attended the SXSW conference…

When working with some of our more recent clients they expressed that they liked their logo to function as a link back to their home page. We had done this in the past but not always in the most SEO-friendly manner. After doing some googling I found a great tutorial to accomplish just this.

Create SEO friendly Text Images Headers from Tutorial Dog