Duct Tape Marketing

If you aren't actively marketing for local search prospects, you are missing out big time.

With billions of pages on the web and millions of pages competing for the same keywords, it can literally cost a fortune to get your site noticed by the search engines. But, if your budget is anything less than a fortune, have no fear. Just follow these few tips:

Sitemaps have been around for a while. They were originally created a visual guide to your website. As websites became larger and more complex webmasters used them as a way to view the entire structure of a website to find the connections between pages. In recent years, the search engines have been viewing site maps as a good way to index websites and find all the related content. Creating and submitting an XML sitemap to Google is still the best way to get your website completely crawled by Google. It has become a standard SEO best practice.

When I talk to many small business owners about the Internet and ways to use it to grow their business, I often encounter this response, "That's just for people trying to sell stuff to people all over the world," or "I tried that and it didn't work for me."

Whenever I hear that type of talk from small business owners, I cringe.