Here are 7 tips small business owners can consider when working on search engine optimization (seo) for their websites.

1. Determine what keywords your customers are using to find someone like you. Get some ideas by asking your friends and colleagues what terms they would use to find someone like you.
2. Every page in your website should have a single theme that relates to one of the keywords from #1 above. Create a Title Tag (80 characters or less) that describess that theme, and then place that Title Tag in the right place on each web-page.
3. Minimize flash and javascript files in your web-page code as these are obstacles that search engines have to overcome when indexing your web-pages. This doesn't mean you have to avoid them altogether - just use them sparingly.
4. Check to see if your website is indexed by the search engine. Go to the Google search bar and type in site:yourdomainname and click Search. For example, if your website address (domain name) is findme.com, then type into the Google search bar site:www.findme.com. Google will give you a list of entries. If you don't see all your web-pages, that means they are not indexed by Google and someone won't find them when doing a search.
5. A big part of good search engine rankings is how many other websites are linking to you. To find out, go to Yahoo search bar and type in link:www.yourdomainname. Yahoo will give you a list of links coming to your site. If you are competing for search engine placement with some other company, check their links as well. The more links and the better quality links, the better your search positioning will be.
6. Get Google Analytics (GA) added to your website. GA is easy to use and provides a ton of information about search engines and visitor behaviors.
7. Consult with a professional SEO specialist. SEO isn't easy and there's a lot of hard work involved. If you aren't ready to pay for a full-blown SEO project to get you top rankings on the first page of Google, then contract with an SEO consultant who can guide you down a path of doing it yourself. .