What is SEO?

This ultimate small business SEO guide (suitable for beginners) will give you a comprehensive, and easy-to-understand guide to all aspects of SEO for small business.

This main aim of this SEO guide is to help entrepreneurs, bloggers and small business owners understand and appreciate every aspect of SEO in a logical and practical way.

In addition to breaking down SEO into it's six major constituent disciplines, you'll also get practical and in-depth advice and information on:

• how to implement and improve SEO
• what's new in SEO (updated regularly so bookmark and check back often)
• where to find the best SEO software and tools
• links to important SEO articles and resources

Different types of SEO

This guide covers all major aspects of SEO, including:

• content SEO
• analytical SEO
• performance SEO
• Technical/HTML SEO
• Image SEO
• Off-site SEO

Where possible I will demonstrate techniques (or refer to other articles) with verifiable SEO examples that you can look at on Google.

Content SEO

Content SEO refers to the techniques you can use to help content appear higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

How to implement content SEO: Content SEO requires you to know which SEO keywords and phrases you want to target. This in turn means you need to do some SEO keyword research before sitting down to write.

The following articles tell you everything you need to know about content SEO:

• Five top SEO tips for small business bloggers
• Anatomy of a blog post: How to get more traffic and social engagement from your content
• Killer SEO tip: How to make the long tail pay

What's new in content SEO: Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates hit a lot of sites. Not all of the updates affected content SEO - Penguin focused on spammy backlinks, for example.

However, almost all of Google's updates are designed to improve the quality of the content returned by their search. Quality! That's the new buzzword. Good content SEO starts with high quality content that is useful, engaging, valuable or entertaining.

Analytical SEO

Analytical SEO makes use of traffic analysis through an analytics service like Google analytics. By analyzing the sources, demographics, browsing patterns and conversions of organic search traffic, it is possible to improve your SEO strategy.

How to implement analytical SEO: The following articles focus on how to use analytics to drive traffic:

• SEO Blogging tips: How to use Google analytics search data to inspire new content
• Five awesome tips to extract valuable SEO secrets from Google analytics data
• How to double your search traffic using SEO, Webmaster tools and Google analytics

What's new in analytical SEO: Still in beta, Google analytic's Real-Time opens up a whole new world of analytical possibilities for SEO and Internet marketing. Check out this article entitled "The latest Internet marketing techniques & SEO tips using Google analytics' Real-Time".

Performance SEO

Performance SEO is a personal favorite of mine. It requires an excellent knowledge of programming (usually PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, DOM), combined with knowledge web architecture, search engines, caching, compression, aggregation and more.

Unless you have some pretty serious in-house expertise on these matters, it's best to consult with a technical SEO expert.

How to implement performance SEO: Fortunately, if you are using a decent CMS like Drupal or WordPress, a reasonable amount of performance related SEO is handled for you automatically.

The following articles show some surprising statistics and results about performance SEO and how to implement and test it (the second one is specific to Drupal, but still holds plenty of advice and tips that apply to all website platforms):

• Improve your SEO and compare the SEO of five leading SEO sites
• Drupal SEO: The best how-to, with bonus SEO tips and tricks, for Drupal webmasters

What's new in performance SEO: One of the most exciting aspects of performance SEO is that it is more "science" than most other SEO disciplines. It can be tested by cool new tools for SEO developers. Check out the article entitled "How to test SEO: Top free SEO tools to easily check the SEO of any page".