Everyday millions of people use the internet to search for businesses in their community and if you don’t have an online presence they won’t find yours!

However just having a website is not enough. You see, there are millions of websites and most of them are never seen by potential customers because the owners of these sites don’t know anything about marketing their small business online.

Now to be totally honest with you I don’t have a small local business. However, I do have an international online business. And I know 1 of the most important things you must do is some on-page and off-page search engine optimization if you want the search engines to find your site.

Don’t know what search engine optimization or SEO is?

Basically SEO is putting the right things in the web page code to make it easier for search engines to find you. On-page SEO are the things people can see when they visit your site while off-page SEO are the things the search engines can see but people can’t. You can find a lot of free information online giving both more detailed descriptions and information about how to do both on and off page SEO.

As you research SEO, 2 of the terms you’ll see a lot are “keyword” or “keyword phrase.” Pay close attention to the information about keywords and keyword phrases because using them correctly is the basic building block of all search engine optimization.

Another one of the important things you’ll discover is there are several free keyword research tools available. And while these tools are extremely useful to those of use doing international online marketing, they may not help you find the best keywords and keyword phrases for your local business. Fortunately there is a keyword research tool designed specifically to find local business keywords at http://www.5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php.

Click here to watch a brief video tutorial that explains why this tool is better at finding good keywords for your local business and learn the basics on how to use it.

The video and the tool are both free to use.

Good luck with marketing your local business online.

Susan Carroll