Small business owners are often hampered when it comes to building an online presence as they don’t have the time to devote to maintaining a web site nor the funds to undertake serious Search Engine Optimization programs. There are a number of things that a small business owner can do to build and maintain that online presence.

Search Engine Optimization has many different angles and whilst a small business owner may not be able to justify spending large sums of money on a consultant, there are aspects that they can undertake themselves.

Web design and content are the cornerstones for any website. If you can get these right then the rest will start to flow smoothly. Many of the Search Engine Optimization requirements can be done fairly quickly and fairly cheaply.

Building a blog presence is one way to start and has proved to be quite effective over the years. Paying for a professional web site is a must. If you cannot justify the cost then you cannot justify being online.

Once you have your blog or website, you need to consider content. You can approach this from several angles. You can produce the content yourself, you can could use friends or family to write your content, or you could employ a content writer.

Changing your content on a regular basis is important. The emphasis being on regular. If you update twice a week, then always update twice a week. If you are unable to produce content, employ someone else to do it for you. There are many cost effective services available and the major benefit is that you not only get good quality articles, they should also be keyword rich.

Small business has more to benefit than many of their larger rivals. Get the Search Engine Optimization right and work within your budget and over time, your traffic will increase and with it your sales.

Having set up a web site you may now be wondering what is best: buying search engine optimization help or starting a pay-per-click campaign? When you consider the pro’s and con’s of each you will find the answer comes easily.

Search Engine Optimization
For a new web site, even with a professional search engine optimization program, you are not going to rank at number one for quite sometime. However, you will never rank in the top 50 (pages) unless you do undertake some form of search engine optimization program.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC campaigns will generate traffic to your website.The more traffic you generate, the more your site will be seen and the better the possibility for natural links to your site - a big bonus when it comes to search engine optimization. Obviously, if your site is a commercial site then PPC will bring extra traffic targeted to your keywords and hopefully ready to open their wallets.

From the above two short descriptors, you are probably already trying to organize your first PPC campaign. Just wait a moment and reread them, particularly the last sentence in he search engine optimization brief.

The choice is no choice, ie, both. You need to undertake both campaigns if you want your web site to succeed. Search engine optimization will provide long term benefits that will generate organic visitors from the search engines. These are ‘free’ visitors, that is, you have not had to pay to get them onto your site.

PPC will get the traffic coming in and hopefully the income. Overtime, if your search engine optimization programs are successful, you find yourself spending less on PPC and generating more in the way of free clicks. PPC can then be used for special promotions.

If you have Adsense for Search options on your web site then you will be interested to know that Google have updated the search facility and it is now powered by Custom Search. As the name implies, you can customize many of the search features for your web site (or blog).

These features include:(courtesy of Adsense blog)

• Site Search: you can choose to provide just site search so users can find all the information they’re looking for on your site.
• Improved indexing of your pages:AdSense for search will now index even more pages of your site, as long as we’re able to crawl them, so that your users will see more results from your site in your AdSense for search results.
• Vertical search:You can also allow your users to search across multiple sites - this could be a network of sites that you own or other related sites that you think your users might find useful.
• Tuning search results and ads with keywords: Search terms can have different meanings in different contexts, so you can now configure your search engine with relevant keywords.
• Selecting ad location: Do you want ads to appear at the top and bottom of your search results? Or along the right sidebar as well, just like on Google.com? Now you can make the call on where ads are placed.
• Quick and easy updates: Just as you use our ad management feature to quickly change the settings for your ad and referral units, you’ll be able to do the same for your search engine within your AdSense account.

This should provide a much better system and possibly a better return for publishers using Adsense for Search. Customization is certainly an improvement on the previous search options.

Feedburner provides one of the best feed URL changing service and it can change the URL of the feed into a more keyword targeted and SEO friendly one. Also many applications work well with the feed URL of feedburner than the normal feed URL. I didn’t know that now Google owns feedburner and may be I was inactive when Google bought Feedburner. But it is not the today’s news and I hear interesting news about Feedburner.

Now you will find Google Adsense in the RSS feeds of Feedburner. Earlier, it was announced that Google Ads would be displayed on the member’s RSS feeds. This integration was announced by Google when they acquired Feedburner last year. But now there is an upgrade in the integration of Google Adsense unit in the RSS feeds.

The integration of Google ads may affect the advertisers of Feedburner and also the Google adsense advertisers. Now Feedburner is completely synchronising with the Google account. Hopefully, from the next week onwards, you can log into the Feedburner account using the Google account. Now advertising in the RSS feeds have become a conflict between the RSS feed advertisers and advertisers of the Adsense.