This is a guest post by Maya who is a 25-year-old marketing specialist. Her special interests are web design and internet marketing. Maya is also a blogger for 123seo.com.au. Follow her on twitter: @MayaEdberg

The area of small business SEO has seen a lot of changes in recent years as search engines like Google continue to update their algorithms in an attempt to weed out some of the low-quality content online. No longer is it easy for small businesses to "game the system" in an attempt to get higher rankings. If you run a small business website or you own a business, you need to pay attention to these changes so that you know what will give you the most bang for your buck when it comes to getting high rankings.

What Changed?

Within the last year, Google has made a few big changes to its algorithm. These changes put an emphasis on quality of content and less on some of the traditional factors that people thought made a difference in the search engines. The first big change was known as the Panda update. It aimed to get rid of some of the "content mills" online that created low-quality content in big volumes to get traffic. This had an effect on many sites that did not have great quality content on their pages.

One of the most important factors that contributes to search engine rankings is the number of high-quality links that sites had pointing to them. To game the system, many people used high PageRank blog networks to get quality links to their sites. This did have an effect on the rankings. Recently, Google decided to de-index many of these networks so that they no longer helped sites.


Keep it Real

So what does this teach the small business webmaster who is in the process of building a competitive website? Keep it real. You can't game the system for an extended period of time and hope to be successful. Google and all of the other search engines are getting smarter everyday. They have teams of very smart people spending all of their time figuring out how to keep people from gaming the system. Because of this, you should put an emphasis on creating the best quality content that you can create on a daily basis. Search engines love quality content and they will direct people to it. Instead of wasting your time figuring out how to get fake links or creating large volumes of low-quality content, spend your time making the best content out there.


Keyword Research

When it comes to small business SEO, one of the best things that you can do is some keyword research. Look for keywords that have decent traffic potential, without a lot of competition. Then build some quality content around those keywords. If you have a good piece of content about a specific keyword, you'll have a good chance to rank highly in the search engines for that specific phrase. This makes it possible for your site to start getting traffic on many different pages from long-tail keyword searches. This is often much more valuable than trying to compete on generic terms that everyone else is trying to rank for.