(newbie!) Being that many of your have lots of experience with SEO, I would like to get your opinion on some of the best ways to improve SEO for small and personal businesses. In particular, what are some of the best ways to use social media tools like Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, and others to improve SEO for your homepage? What have been some of your techniques? -------- Disclosure: I am building a Central.ly, a website similar to about.me but specifically for personal businesses and small businesses. I am trying to learn as much about the community so we include a product that benefits you! You can track our progress at Central.ly
The most important SEO factors: web page title tag (including keywords and coding) unique content domain name domain age incoming links (and iternal links) and lots of other things You can read my short introduction to seo You can discuss for days about SEO and SEO techniques. I have wrote some posts about SEO that could help you: SEO
I would say the best way to start out would be to make sure your meta data is in line with your keyword(s). To get a better idea of what I mean search for some terms that you would like to place high for and look at the meta data of your competition. Then make your own meta data mirror theirs. Other factors include how many backlinks link to your site (sites linking to your site from theirs), how often you update your content (search engines like to see fresh content on a daily basis), and the keyword repetition on your main homepage as well. Google especially is known for looking at keyword repetition as a major factor in search engine placement for a certain search term. Then look into Google's Webmaster Tools application and submit a sitemap for your website (sitemaps outline the pages of your site making it easier for Google to crawl through them).
If you're a small business that just operates in one town, a great basic step is to claim your local listings in the major search engines at GetListed.org. When you're filling out your local listings, be as comprehensive as possible when filling them out (add hours of operation, photos, videos, etc).... Also try to get as many reviews as possible in different locations (Yelp, Google, Yahoo) this seems to be a big factor in ranking well within local search results.
This is a great idea. I've never used GetListed.org before that sounds like a great service. Do they have a relationship with the search engines.
if you want to use social media make sure you got good content to drive users to your content... you can create pages to promote your site but don't make it too promotion to make look spamming.