Every small business owner knows the importance of a high search engine ranking. SEO experts and internet marketing professionals have built their careers around figuring out how to help their clients achieve top rankings, and small business owners draw on that expertise every day. But whether you’ve done your own search engine optimization or had a professional do it on your behalf, things sometimes go wrong. If search engines believe that you’re spamming or using any other off-limits methods of optimization, you will be banned, often without even realizing it. Here are 5 sign that you’ve been penalized by Google.

1. You Have a PageRank of 0. PageRank is Google’s method of ranking the popularity and relevance of websites. If Google had previously ranked you, but you noticed that your current PageRank is 0, you can almost guarantee that Google has penalized you. Before you panic, remember that…

Anyone with a background in marketing remembers the 4 P’s, right? If you don’t, they are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. While the 4 P’s are still important, it’s time to get familiar with 4 new P’s of inbound marketing: Persona, Publishing, Participation, and PageRank.

Inbound marketing is anything you do to make connections with potential customers. It may be social networking, search engine optimization, or article marketing. The power of inbound marketing is that it is an efficient way to generate sales leads through relationships created by social media, through inbound links, and through search engine rankings.

So, what do you need to know about the 4 P’s of inbound marketing?

1. Persona. Persona refers to the profile of the demographic you want to reach. But don’t be fooled into thinking that…

If you’re a small business owner then you know how difficult it is to get into the top Google rankings for your targeted keywords. It may be that you want to hire an SEO expert or internet marketing agency to take care of SEO for you. But if you don’t, here are 11 things to keep in mind as your optimize your website.

1. Write for readers. While it’s important to optimize your site so that spiders pay attention, remember that it’s human who are going to buy your product or service. Make sure you content is relevant, interesting, helpful, and unique. Bots are not buying your stuff, humans are. Of course you need to include keywords in your text, but never so many that they render your copy unreadable.

2. Include a unique meta description and title on each page. The title of your page is the key on-site SEO factor. Your description tag won’t influence your rank, but it will most likely be what potential…