Many small business web site owners make a mistake of not paying attention to basicSearch Engine Optimization (SEO) of their web pages. This usually happens because of two reasons: one, they create the web site themselves and have no idea about what SEO is and why they should pay attention to it, or two, they hired a “trusted, knowledgeable web designer” to design their site, and s/he has not included SEO in the project proposal.

For sure, you could make SEO an art, but following a few basic steps – accessible to anyone – will go a long way. By all means, if your budget allows you to pay for a professionally devised and managed SEO strategy, do it.

However, for a solo professional, small business owner or a non-profit organization on a limited budget, applying these simple SEO strategies will do wonders for your organic search engine results.

1. Each page should have a descriptive file name

In other words don’t name the files just services.html, or even worse page02.html, but try something like email-marketing-services-consulting.html. This will help the search engines index your pages more thoroughly if you use keywords that are relevant to the content of that page.

2. Give each page a unique title.

This goes under the <meta title> tag. You have about 60 characters, or about 10 words, whichever is less in your particular case. The page title is like a summary of the content. Again use the relevant keywords, or you can make it a call to action, for example a “Contact Us” page could have this title: Receive a free email marketing consultation – Call 905-844-4247 now!

Read this post for 3 more tips on basic search engine optimization for small business.