For me, branding is, an identity of a product, service, or business.

First, gathering the fuel from our brainstorming the question we have to ask ourselves is, what is the problem and how should we solve it. The information we explored, we concluded that the next phase of our research and development clearly understands what branding means. Branding establishes a common ground or goal within the company. Building a product or service is important to a business in the marketplace. It will create value that differentiates who you are as a company. Bringing our brand personality to the surface we channel a “we” attitude rather than the “I”. This is a team working together continuing to develop an innovative internal company as well as external. Internally changing the brand making it unique. Externally providing businesses a marketing service. The main goals being tackled head on are changing themes, font consistency to the brand, and colors that will lead you wanting more. All these internal points of interest are important to a brand because you do not want to create confusion. By creating confusion in consumer’s minds the message wont be clearly conveyed.

It is crucial that your product stands out through other various media types. A well-branded product or service determines its company’s position in the market place. The image has to be professional and different so unique it stands out among the rest. Having a USP, Unique Selling Proposition will communicate a brand promise, an identity that incorporates logo, and brand identity. While inspiring creative thought in a work environment, the USP of Growth Spark gives new growth providing a marketing service to businesses that are looking to grow online. Promising to build and channel innovative strategies, Growth Spark will value an easy profitable and fun business. Through that online medium it successfully heightens the level of awareness and delivers a clear concise message.

Branding is the most important word to understand in the marketplace. If you do not have a brand you have nothing. Being clear and concise is the key. Less is more. Create a message that allows your brand to stay unique and be ahead of the times. This will create brand loyalty within your target market. Staying true to your brand will not create doubt.  Primarily, branding and what it means to us understanding growth. Growth Spark will continue to question the brand only to maintain a high level of presence online. This will keep the brand fresh and inviting to its consumers, which in the end create brand loyalty among their target.

Amber Goldberg is an Advertising student at The New England Institute of Art. She graduates in August, 2010. As an intern, she assists in industry research, competitive analysis, press release drafting, and implementing client-facing marketing strategies.

Branding refers to establishing the identity or image of a company. It can be as simple as designing a logo or as intricate as creating a specific style and structure for all products and literature associated with the company. Our ultimate goal was to have a style that was unique to Growth Spark, one that people will recognize as ours whether they see it on a webpage or a pamphlet. In order to develop this style, our branding has to convey the qualities that define our company: a passion for collaborating with our clients and open, team-oriented discussion on projects.

Prior to this branding meeting, we had already established some key branding elements like the logo that appears on all of our products. At the meeting we debated a new design for business cards and a new stationary for our literature when we realized that it is important to have consistency across these formats. Our fonts, colors, and imagery must be consistent between the webpage and the printed page. Because we need to maintain consistency, we noticed that if we make one change, it leads to more changes. For example, if we were to drastically change the business cards, we would need to change the website. We need to make sure the colors and fonts seen on the card are also seen on the website.

Since one change can lead to many, we needed to establish priorities. We’re a busy, growing company and needed to decide what we can handle at the moment. Realizing this, we agreed that our goal at this point isn’t to completely rebrand or restructure our identity. We don’t have the time or resources for such a project. But after that meeting, we had much more perspective on the process of branding and the role it will play in our future.

Redefining our image will be a complicated matter, but we can start by representing the ideals of Growth Spark through our activities and interactions. These ideals have lead us to create an environment in which everyone has an equal voice, feedback is valued and collaboration is encouraged, and it is these ideals which will guide us in future branding efforts.

Alex Ramirez is an intern at Growth Spark and a Junior at Emmanuel College majoring in English Communications. As an intern, he assists in press release drafting, competitive analysis, industry research and implementing client-facing marketing strategies.

This is the seventh and final post in Growth Spark's SEO Basics for Business Owners series.

So, you've been working hard on improving your SEO, but how do you know if it is getting the results you want? You can search for your keywords to see that they are higher in the rankings. You can keep track of how many orders you get. But the best way is to use analytics software, where you can see the real statistics of people that visit your site, where they come from, and what they do there. Armed with this information you will know which SEO tactics are working, and you can go back to the beginning and continuously improve.

The most popular way to keep track of your website visitor's statistics is Google Analytics (free). While Google is the leader, they do have some competition worth mentioning. Clicky (basic free, pro $10/month) provides a high level of detail on individual visitors. Mint ($30/site) is a self-hosted analytics program. Crazy Egg (basic $10/month) tracks exactly where people click on your site, very useful for optimizing layout and determining behaviors of visitors from different sources. The great thing about analytics programs is that you can use as many as you want simultaneously, and many people use more than one.

There's so much information available though, that it's hard not to be blown away and engulfed all at once. This post will run you through the basic and most important reports in Google Analytics.

Setting up Google Analytics

Setting up Google Analytics (GA) is relatively simple. It requires that you get a piece of code and insert it in the footer of every page that you wish to track. To get the code, sign in to your Google account at http://www.google.com/analytics/. If it is your first time setting up analytics, Google will guide you through the process. If you're going back a second time, you want to find the profile you created for your website, and select 'Edit.' On the next page, at the top right of the 'Main Website Profile Information' box, click "check status." Now you will be presented with the code that needs to be inserted into your website.

At this stage, just copy & paste the code into each page just before the </body> tag. If your website is built using PHP, you can usually just paste it once into the footer.php file and it will be displayed on every page that includes the footer. If you're using a CMS such as Wordpress, you can use a plugin which will insert the analytics tracking code into each page. If you're not sure about this step, since it is a little technical, contact your website developer or manager and they should be able to do it for you. In fact, installing analytics should be a basic included feature in any website build project.

The Dashboard

The first thing you will see when you open up GA for the first time is the dashboard. It looks like there is a lot of information here, but it really only scratches the surface. It is highly customizable, but the default GA Dashboard shows you Site Usage, Visitors Overview, Map Overlay, Traffic Sources Overview, and Content Overview.

The Default GA Dashboard

The Site Usage section gives you a really good brief glance at general user behavior on your site. You can see how many pages the average person visited, how many people left the site after viewing only one page (Bounce Rate), how long people spend on the site on average, and how many of the people are new visitors.

The Visitors Overview section is basically a reflection of the main graph, and so it is the least useful of the default panels. You can remove it by clicking the x at the top right of its box.

The Map Overlay is very cool to look at. It tells you what part of the world your visitors are coming from and, if you click on it, it can even drill down to the individual city. While it is a very cool feature, for most businesses it won't actually give you much actionable data. It will most of the time look like the image above for US companies: the States are dark green, and other countries are white or light green.

Traffic Sources and Content Overview are the most useful for SEO reasons. Traffic Sources tells you whether your visitors came directly (typed in your URL), were referred by another site (clicked a link), or came from search engines. The Content Overview tells you what the most popular pages on your site are.

But these overview reports are not specific enough to really let you know at a glance if your SEO efforts are working. There are a few other elements that you can add to your dashboard to make it a bit more useful.

Click on 'view report' in the Traffic Sources Overview, then on the next page under keywords on the bottom right click "View Full Report." This brings you to a page which lists your keywords which people used to find your site. On this page, below the graph, you will want to click 'non-paid,' because we want to look at only organic keywords. This is where you can see how each of your keywords is doing in terms of how much traffic it sends to your site. You can click the "Add to Dashboard" button at the top of the page to add this to your dashboard.

Organic Keyword Report

We'll get a little more advanced for the next section, even though this is an Analytics basics article. A great thing to be able to see  is which pages people are coming to directly from the search engine results. Do get this, we will have to use an Advanced Segment, but GA makes this feature really easy to use.

On the left-side navigation, go to Content, then Top Landing Pages. The display will show all of the pages people landed on when they first visited your site. We want to narrow it down a bit to show only the ones that came from search engines results pages. To do that, just go to the top-right corner where it shows the Advanced Segments selector. Click on that, and select the box which says "Non-paid Search Traffic." Not it is showing your most effective pages in regards to SEO: the ones that are pulling in the most search engine traffic.

Landing Pages from Search Results

You can add the top landing pages to your dashboard, but the advanced segments will not be contained in the small dashboard box. So, it will not show only the landing pages from search traffic, but from all traffic sources.

As you look through the different sections of GA, you will find some sections particularly useful and interesting, and you can always add those to your dashboard as well. Each website is different, and will have a different set of metrics that are important. Other features that are likely to be on the dashboard are ecommerce tracking and goals, which leads us to the next section:

Analytics Goal Setting and Tracking

While the dashboard is nice to look at to give you information quickly, you can leave it as-is. But you need to set up goals for your website!

Goals are how you track whether users are doing what you want them to do. For every website it might be different. It may be to buy a product, to register an account, sign up for a newsletter, download a white paper, or even just to view over a certain number of pages. In reality, each website will likely have many goals that they would like visitors to complete.

The reason that goals are so important is that they are the real measurement of your success. Visitor counts and bounce rates might be interesting, but they don't show you if any visitors are converting into potential customers.

If you haven't set up Goals yet, click the button in the left-hand navigation and it will bring you to a Goals Overview page where you can click "Set up goals and funnels." If you already have set up goals though, you will have to go back to the Edit section of your profile (the page before you got the tracking code), and you can edit goals there. Either way, we get to the same place.

In GA, you are allowed to have up to 20 goals organized into 4 groups. Click 'add goal' to start a new one. Let's use the example that we want a visitor to download a free brochure. They will typically click the download brochure link from the homepage, then are brought to the download success page once the download is complete. For purposes of example, let's say that one out of every ten people that download the brochure end up making a purchase that results in $100 of revenue. Here's how to set up this goal :

Some things to note that are important: You should, if possible, always have a Goal Value set for your goal. This is how you can tell which visitors and keywords are making you money, and which aren't. Especially when you have many goals set up that are worth different amounts, this will be the indicator of success. To find a goal value, take the percent of people who will make a purchase, times the average revenue per customer for this action. In the above example we have 10% x $100 = $10  as our equation.

Conversion Rate x Average Revenue per Customer = Goal Value

The Goal Funnel represents the normal path that a visitor will take to arrive at your goal. Here it is only 2 clicks, but some actions may be longer (such as signing up for an account).  If you set this up, GA can show you a visual representation of where people enter and exit your Funnel. It is a great indicator of which pages are effective, and how many clicks people are willing to go through to reach a certain goal. While it is an optional feature, I recommend it.

Conclusions and More Resources

This post on basic analytics tracking for SEO really only touched on a few of the main things you will want to do when you first set up Google Analytics. As you dive in to the different sections, you will find that there is almost too much information to handle. Advanced reports and segments will help you filter out some of the noise, and ecommerce tracking is essential for anyone running an online store or ecommerce website. These may be featured in future posts here at Growth Spark, but for now I would like to leave you with some articles that go deeper into the world of analytics for those who are interested.

• A Guide to Google Analytics and Useful Tools
• The Missing Google Analytics Manual
• Official GA Blog: Back to Basics
• Introduction to Google Analytics

Image Credits: tastybits, Search Engine People Blog

One thing that have a great positive impact on your website is constantly adding content. Each new page you create is a new chance to show up in the search engine results.

Search engines are constantly browsing the web, looking for new content to index. When they come across a website that updates or adds content often, the search engines make a note to return to that website more frequently to look for new content. Sites that update and add content regularly are more likely to have a lot of pages in the search engine's index, which means that they will show up in search results.

Changing & Updating Content

When updating existing pages, you should try to make sure that it will improve the rankings rather than hurt. For example, if you have a page that is in the number one spot for a certain keyword, I would recommend not changing it. You might think that by adding content to this page, you could get it to rank higher for its second-best keyword as well. In a lot of cases, especially if this page is ranking because of on-page factors, adding more keyword variations will 'dilute' the keyword density and the page could drop from the number one spot.

If you're already at the number one spot, you should instead try to build links pointing to that page containing the secondary keyword. Links are a very powerful aspect of search engine optimization, and are more likely to have a positive impact in this scenario.

In another situation, if you have a page that is not doing well, adding and changing content could be a good strategy. Continue to update and add to the information on the page, and it may do better over time. SEO and content updating is a constant process; an ongoing experiment to see what makes each page go up in the rankings.

SEO Blogging and Writing Tips

Blogging is a great way to continuously add more content to your website. A lot of companies are starting corporate blogs, and all have different writing styles. Your blog should reflect your company's corporate culture.

Keep in mind that the first goal of your blog should be to have people read it and share it with their friends (links!), and only secondarily focused on search engine optimization. Interesting, informative, insightful, or provocative topics are better than just choosing a keyword for each post and forming a post around it.

Write your post first, then once it's done you can go back and make sure that the words you used fit relevant keywords. If you think of the keyword first, it could come out choppy and unnnatural: not something people want to read. Remember that links are worth much more than on-page optimization.

If possible, you should have a good writer from your company write the blog and website, then have it proofread and edited by a professional if needed. If you're not sure that anyone on your staff is qualified, you can hire a professional writer to write the blog. A word of warning though - make sure that your hired writer is accurately reflecting your brand image in the blog.

Here are a few tips for writing and blogging on the web:

• Use correct spelling and grammar.
• Short is often better. Reading on the computer screen is easier when there are short sentences and paragraphs.
• Use lists. People love lists, and it can make your posts more readable.
• Include pictures! It will add some color and make your posts more attractive.
• Post regularly. Depending on your ability this could mean once per week, or once per day.

These tips don't just apply to blogging though. You can always add pages to your main website as well. If you have a new product or service, a new member on your team, or a new client testimonial, all these things can be used to create new pages on your website that also have the possibility to lead to more traffic. Once you have a lot of content, you need to see who is visiting it so that you can improve. The last part in the cycle of search engine optimization is tracking with analytics software, which will be covered in the next post in this series.

Image Credit: dbdbrobot

This is the fifth post in Growth Spark's SEO Basics for Business Owners series.

Links are what makes the internet work. It's called the world wide web or the net, and if websites are the knots in the net, then links are the threads that keep it together. The search engines know this, and they use links to travel from site to site. There are many ways that search engines rank websites, but the main factor is the amount and quality of external links coming in.

Quantity is an easy thing to measure. There are total number of links, linking domains, and linking pages. With links on the web, diversity is key. If you have 100 links from one other webpage, it's not going to help your rankings more than if you just had one link from that page. If you have one website linking to you from all its pages, that will be very good, but it would be much better to have two websites linking to your from half of their pages each. Note that at this point we are not talking about quality of links, only quantity in a general sense. The best case scenario is that you have a lot of different domains linking to you from a lot of their pages. The number of links per page as a general rule shouldn't be more than 3, and 1 is usually enough per page.

Quality is slightly different and more complicated. There are a couple general rules to keep in mind when trying to get links though. The best links will come from high traffic sites with a high PageRank (Google's ranking system for pages), with a similar topic to your site, and that have been around a long time. Websites can pass on their ranking quality in their links. A site that ranks well is a good one to get a link from, and better if it relates to your topic. You want to avoid linking to or getting links from spammy sites, because search engines may associate your site with those spammy sites.

Technical Linking Structure

The best way to get a link is to use good anchor text. Anchor text is the word or words that the person clicks on to access the link. You want the anchor text in your link to be the top keyword that you are promoting for that particular page. Here is the html that you will use to do it:

<a href="http://www.growthspark.com/services/web-design/">Web Design Services</a>, and it looks like this: Web Design Services

This will help your page rank for that particular keyword. Generally you don't need more than that in a link. If you can't get the correct anchor text, the next best thing would be to either use your brand name as the anchor text or just to use the full URL. Having the URL as a link will not help as much on getting up in the rankings for a particular keyword, but it will help your rankings overall because it still counts as another link.

How to Get Links

There are many ways to get links, and there are link building specialists who devote all their time to getting links for clients. But really, anyone can do it. I just want to offer one piece of advice upfront: don't buy links. It is tempting and sounds easy, but it is frowned upon by search engines and could get your site penalized. A lot of link brokers are known, so just buying from them can get you an automatic deduction. There are some reputable link services out there, but in general, buying links in bulk for cheap could get you into that "spammy circle" that I recommended avoiding above.

The most straightforward way to get links is to simply ask for them. If you have friends in similar industries or know someone who owns a site with your same target customer, ask them to link to you. Pitch them how your site will benefit their readers and you may be surprised how many sites are happy to throw in a link for you.

A link building technique that is common for businesses to get links is through directories or industry associations. You can submit your site to industry-specific directories, or general web directories such as dmoz or yahoo. Some directories are paid, and some are not, but the two aforementioned directories are among the most influential. Yahoo has a fee, and dmoz does not. Just be sure to submit your listing to the correct category. As long as it is categorized correctly and is relevant and useful, dmoz will usually list it. IF you are a member of any industry associations, ask them to add a link to your site on their website. Many associations have member pages where they link to their members.

Another popular way to get links is to interact in online communities. Nearly every industry has forums, blogs, news portals, and social networks. One way to get links is to join these communities, and talk to other members there. You can put a link in your profile, in your signature (on forums), or some websites offer areas where members can advertise or talk about their business as well. Think of the communities as you would in real life, and remember that there are real people in your industry on the other side. Treat them as you would treat a business associate you're meeting for the first time. Share and provide relevant information, and sometimes that will include a link to your website.

Are you an expert on a certain topic? Nearly everyone is an expert in something, whether it's some aspects of your industry or products, or even just general business knowledge. There are a ton of publishing platforms on the web, you can write guest posts on industry blogs or create your own articles and pages. This way not only allows you to slip a link into your bio at the bottom of the article, but it will increase your name and brand recognition as well. By providing relevant, interesting information you are enticing other people to link to your article or your website. Some recommended sites for publishing are EZine Articles for writing articles, Squidoo for building webpages, and Wordpress for blogging. After you have some articles published, you can submit articles or press releases to more popular news sites, as they can be very good links (but harder to get).

The methods to get links are endless and just depend on your creativity. Once your website is built, most of the effort put into SEO will be with link building, as it has the most impact on your rankings. You will spend most of your time doing SEO between building links and creating new content to link to.

Image Credits: DRB62, michael.cortina

This is the fourth post in Growth Spark's SEO Basics for Business Owners series.

There are many things you can do on your webpage to influence traffic rankings. These things mostly have to do with placing your keywords in particular parts of code included in your page. Without getting too technical, we will explain where to be sure to put your keywords, in order of importance.

One thing to remember is that although inserting keywords into the page is very helpful, be sure not to overdo it. "Keyword stuffing" is the practice of filling up a whole page with keywords and, aside from the fact that it's barely readable, search engines are smart enough that they don't get tricked pages that are stuffed with keywords and may tend to ignore them.

1. The Title Tag:

It is especially important to have your main keyword in your site's Title (which shows up at the top of the browser and in search results), and if possible, put it as the first word.

Some companies who want brand recognition will put the company name first in the Title. Unless your brand name is readily recognizable, or you are running a branding campaign, I would generally recommend putting the keyword (name of the page) first, then putting | followed by your brand name

In Google's search engine results, they only display the first 65 characters of a Title, so keep your Title shorter than that as a general rule.

Example:

Code block

<title>Blue Suede Shoes | The Boston Shoe Company</title>

2. Root Domain Name:

This is something you would need to plan ahead for, but having your top keyword in your domain name can be beneficial for SEO.

While it is very helpful if you are only selling one product for example, most companies will rather choose their brand name as the root domain name. It is more more recognizable for customers, and will not change over time.

If you are promoting a certain product or service, you may plan to build a specific webpage just to promote that product or service. In that case, it will be very helpful if you can get a domain with the keyword in it.

Example: www.bluesuedeshoes.com or www.bostonshoeco.com

3. H1 Headline:

Each page of your site should have only one h1 tag, and it should ideally contain your keyword. This is the main header that search engines will take note of. Using the keyword in h2 and h3 sub-headers are not as important

Example:

Code block

<h1>Blue Suede Shoe Models</h1>

4. Internal Link Anchor Text

Anchor text is the words that you use to link to another web page. Internal link anchor text refers to links that lead to other pages on your own website. By using your keyword as the anchor text for these internal links, it will have a positive effect on your page's rankings for that keyword.

Example:

Code block

<p>See more <a href="http://www.bostonshoeco.com/mens/suede">blue suede shoe</a> models on our men's suede shoes page.</p>

5. External Link Anchor Text

Similarly to internal links with anchor text, external (out-going) links can have a positive effect as well. While it can be tempting to keep all the links to yourself, it's best not to be greedy with links. Linking out can have a lot of benefits, in addition to increasing your rankings for the anchor text keyword. It can also gain you some recognition and, depending on who you link to, could inspire more people to link back to your site.

Example:

Code block

<p>Did you know that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Suede_Shoes">blue suede shoes</a> inspired a song?</p>

6. Keyword in first 100 words of the body

Having your keyword mentioned in different variations throughout the page is great, but more importantly, you should mention your most sought-after keyword phrase within the first 100 words of the text on your web page. The earlier you mention it the better, but be sure not to mess up grammar to insert your keyword. Remember, you should write for your customers and visitors first, and optimize your website for search engines without hindering the visitors' experience.

7. Keyword in image "alt" text attribute

The alt text of images does not much affect the behavior of visitors, and will go unnoticed by most. It is designed to provide a snippet of text in the event that the image doesn't load or the visitor is visually impaired. However, since search engines read html and do not see images, they will look at the alt text to determine what it is and ultimately what your page is about. This can help your images rank better in image search, but it also can have an influence on the page's rankings.

Example:

Code block

<img src="http://www.bostonshoeco.com/images/blue-suede-shoes-1.jpg" title="Blue Suede Shoes - Front View" alt="blue suede shoes">

note: The image title attribute doesn't have an affect on rankings, but is optional text to provide more information to visitors. It usually will show when a visitor has the mouse on top of the image. Image title text is optional, but alt text should be on every image on your site.

Incorporating your keyword into all of these elements will be a good foundation to move up in the search engine results. For more competitive keywords though, you will need to do off-page optimization. Off page search engine optimization generally consists of acquiring links to your site, whether from people naturally linking to you, or through linkbuilding.

Image credit: Jurvetson

Post-its are a great way to visualize pages when planning your website

This is the third post in Growth Spark's SEO Basics for Business Owners series.

When building a website, in addition to thinking about the user interface, design, and content, you should take a step back and look at the site as a whole. Planning the site structure entails making a list of all of the pages on your website, and organizing them by the hierarchy of navigation sections or categories that you intend to use on your site.

The difficulty in this process will mostly be directly correlated with the number of unique pages your website has. For search engine optimization, the objective will be to have every page on your site reachable from the homepage within 3 clicks. This may not be possible for news sites with huge archives, but for most business sites it is easily achievable.

The reason you want each page reachable within 3 clicks, besides making the information accessible to your visitors, is that search engines will sometimes abandon drilling down through too many links to find content on your site. The result is that obscure pages may end up not being indexed, because search engine spiders could not reach them easily from the home page.

The best way to set up your site is to have as many sites linked to from your home page as possible. For aesthetic reasons, this will often not be possible. So, the second best approach is to have the homepage link to category pages, which in turn link to all pages related to that category. In this structure, ideally someone will only have to click twice to reach each page.

Another way to make your pages easily accessible is to link to other pages within the content of each page. This will make your website more connected, information easier to find, and if you use correct anchor text, it can help with rankings for specific keywords as well.

When planning your site, another issue to make sure you avoid is duplicate content. This means having the exact same content in two different places on your website.
Using the shoe store as an example, let's say you have a product page for a men's leather shoe. You might be tempted to put the product under two categories:

www.bostonshoeco.com/mens/shoe1.html
www.bostonshoeco.com/leather/shoe1.html

This could be a problem for search results, since only one result is shown, and because the links you acquire will not be focused on one URL, it will be more harmful to have two pages with the same content.

There are two ways to solve this issue. If you have a small site, I would say less than 100 products, you can have a flat site structure and create the product page: www.bostonshoeco.com/shoe1.html
It won't have the category name in the URL, and you can link to it from anywhere on the site.

For larger sites, for organizational reasons, this usually isn't feasible. A more common approach would be to create the product page: www.bostonshoeco.com/mens/leather/shoe1.html
It is still a clear and rational way to organize the products, and it will only take 3 clicks to get to that page.

These are the types of things that you should keep in mind when defining your site structure. For small business sites, keep the structure as flat as possible, but also organize it clearly for visitors to navigate and avoid duplicate content. Once you've decided on a structure, you're ready to start building individual pages, with a focus on SEO in the code itself.

Image credit: kowitz

This is the second post in Growth Spark's SEO Basics for Business Owners series.

Take each of your customer profiles and come up with a list of words you think they will type in Google to try to find your product or service. This brainstorm is step number one of keyword research.

Make sure that if you're in the shoe business, don't just think of generic words like "shoes" and "boots." Think of what people will really be looking for like "women's wide running shoes" or "sheepskin moccasin." Most people type in 2-word, 3-word, and 4-word phrases because they at least have an idea of what they want.

One- and two-word keywords are the hardest to rank for because they are the most generic. More than 200 million websites include the word "shoes," but only 4 million include "sheepskin moccasin." Even less show up for the 4-word example above. Don't be discouraged by seeing results in the millions. As the vast majority of those sites are not optimized, you are already one step ahead. That being said, being a big fish in a small pond is always the better decision.

There are a lot of free keyword tools you can use to help you figure out what ones to go for.

• Wordtracker - One of the classic and reliable keyword tools. Offers search volume and alternate keywords for any given phrase
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool - The most popular keyword tool, gives you results of search volume and advertiser competition for keywords based on either a phrase you type in, paragraph of text, or webpage entered by URL.
• SEObook - Keyword tool based on Wordtracker. Gives back a lot of useful data all at once

Once you find a list of keywords that fit your site, group them into categories. You should have each page of your site focus on no more than 5 very similar keywords to start. Also, try not to overlap your keywords. That way, when someone searches for a specific keyword, the search engine will not have to guess which page of your site to bring up; there will be one page that is clearly the best choice. Search engines tend to only show one page from one website in the search results at a time.

Image Credit: Cambodia4KidsOrg

This is the first post in Growth Spark's SEO Basics for Business Owners series.

If your company is well-established, you probably already know who your target customers are and what their needs are. If you're not sure, ask your marketing department. For those of you that are in early-stage  companies, you may not be so sure about your target audience.

The best way is to reach out to your current customers and ask them what their needs are. Come up with profiles of different types of people who use your service, make them real, give them names. It will help you really to envision the people who come to you.  These profiles will be important not only for SEO, but for all aspects of marketing.

A key part that many people miss in doing SEO is to think about the fact that there are actually people on the other side of their computer typing in words into a search engine hoping to find your company. It is essential to really put yourself into your potential customers' shoes who don't know you but want what you have.

There are several free online tools to help you find out more about your target audience and their needs:

• eMarketer - Research articles on demographics. A mix of free and subscription options
• Forrester - Free resource section on their website
• InternationalBusinessStrategies.com - Free, but not many reports regarding US markets. Coverage of many countries
• The US Census Bureau - Go-to source for all demographic statistics in the States

Once you know what your customers are looking for, you can create your site and content based upon that. This is much more efficient and will be more effective than the common technique of creating content first, then trying to change it to fit the searching habits of customers. When you have the mindset and needs of your customers pinned, it's time to move on to keyword research.

Image Credit: etech