Andrea Wilson’s Blog

I work directly with some small to medium bricks-and-mortar businesses and run across the Web sites of many more in my daily online activities. Most of these businesses have no idea how to optimize their site for the search engines.

To me, it seems like an impossible task to reach all these businesses and help them. While many of the obvious tasks can be taught, almost all of these stem from having done the right keyword research in the first place. And, in my opinion, keyword research is the hardest part of SEO.

For many businesses, their keywords may seem obvious, but likely there are long-tail keyword phrases, misspellings, abbreviations and less obvious keywords that could push them to the top of Google, but that they will never discover.

For other businesses, the right keywords are very elusive. They just never seem to be able to settle on exactly the right ones, so no keywords get enough attention on their site to register well with any search engine.

And then there are many businesses who still believe that if you put up a Web site, their customers will find them! Keywords? Search engine optimization? Huh? Oh boy, talk about a tough sell! Good luck getting them to buy a search engine optimization package. You’ll need to explain it all very carefully in layman’s language. Your best bet is to team up with a Web designer who doesn’t do SEO, but who understands it and will make sure their clients appreciate the need for it. If the client trusts their Web designer, you will have an easier time getting the client’s business.

Do-It-Yourself Web Design and SEO

If you’re an XSite Pro user, however, the whole SEO thing just got easier. First of all, SEO is built into XSite Pro so you will have a fighting chance to score well will the search engines right off the bat. Second, James Schramko has put out an excellent ebook called XSP Cheat Sheet that takes search engine optimization for XSite Pro to a whole new level.

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