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For the absolute beginner SEO can seem daunting and for a home business the costs of using a professional company can be prohibitive. Although some of the topics can seem technical and impenetrable the basics can be covered with a minimum of technical ability. For the home business website owner following these basic steps will have a positive impact on your website's search engine visibility.

1. Research your market and research the keywords and phrases people who would buy from you are typing into search engines. Search Google for 'keyword tools'. Weave the keywords and phrases into your content and use the phrases that are the most important as keywords in your URL's. For example if you find people search for cheap blue widgets' and you sell these you might create a page of content about cheap blue widgets with the URL http://www.yoursite.com/cheap- blue-widgets. These are known as Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URL's.

2. Use your keywords and phrases in your page's HTML TITLE TAG. This is a VERY important step. Google displays 66 characters from your page's title tag in the search engine result pages. Yahoo displays 120 characters.

3. Write a short synopsis of your page and put this in the META DESCRIPTION TAG. Google will often use the META DESCRIPTION as the snippet of info it displays in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's). This means the meta description tag is a sales opportunity. It's also worth including a call to action in this text such as your phone number.

4. Moving on to the page content. Use HTML H1 TAGs to describe the main content area. For example if your page of content is about our Blue Widgets make sure Blue Widgets is given an H1 TAG at the start of the content.

5. Make your navigation easy to use. Avoid JavaScript, Flash etc if possible. You can create fantastic navigation effects with simple Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) commands.

6. Use a sitemap. A sitemap will let the search engines find every bit of content on your site.

7. Tell Google about your sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools.

8. Install Google Analytics (or similar) to see how people are using your site.

9. Establish links to your website from other complimentary websites. Try to avoid simple reciprocal links as you link to me, I'll link to you' doesn't really work very well. Ideally you want one way links. Getting links from authority sites is difficult and will take a long time, be patient.

If you follow these tips you will be heading in the right direction. Don't underestimate the time needed to carry out SEO. There are NO SHORTCUTS and any offers to get you to the top of Google by cold calling SEO companies should be treated with extreme caution, in fact, just hang up!

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