Many small business owners know very little to nothing about advertising their business online. There is just such an abundance of information out there and its more than your average person with little knowledge about the internet can handle.
Its the reason why many people have avoided the internet until now. Its complicated and its difficult to get a straight answer no matter what you are looking for. There seems to be a thousand ways of doing everything on the internet.
Nevertheless, I work for an Portland SEO company and I have personally ranked over 100 websites for local search terms not only here but Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, Phoenix, and northern California.
I want to start by saying unless a person has many extra hours to spend by his company it will be impossible for him to do it alone. We have a team of 15 people who work for our firm and each person has a different duty. I personally am the content writer and link builder but we have people who just do directory submissions, internet yellow page submissions, optimizing, web builds, and article submissions. It takes a lot of people to get a website to the top of Google.
But, if you do not have a couple hounded dollars to give to a company like mine try this:
- get some of your friends who have businesses themselves to give you a link off their website and you can do the same for them
- pay $200 to be listed in the Yahoo Directory (very strong link)
- look for local directories specific to your city and submit website there
- Write some interesting content on your website outlining what you do
