No small business marketing tool is going to prove more effective in today's world than improving your sites rankings in the search engines. In today's fluctuating market, a small business is simply going to find it too difficult to survive, let alone thrive, without a strong presence on the internet. The great thing about the internet is that you don't have to hire an advertising consultant that costs you thousands of dollars just to get your website to start turning a profit. Instead, all you really have to do is get your site optimized so that it lists higher in the search engines. Millions of people are on the internet searching for a wide variety of topics and products every single day.
Think about it. If you can find ways to make your site list near the top of any search for terms related to your business, then you are going to see a skyrocketing of the number of visitors that your website encounters. Now, that does not mean that every visitor is going to make a purchase; however, the conversion rates should definitely be a factor if you want to build your business over the long term.
The best small marketing tool on the internet for those just starting out is probably a carefully executed link building campaign. The ranking of your website in the search engines is based on a number of different factors which are then combined in a complicated algorithm to determine your ranking. However, SEO specialists have determined what some of the most important factors in those algorithms are and one is incoming links to your website. It is important to get a large number of links coming in to your web page but it is equally important that they come from high quality sites. If you have a link coming in from a site that is low in terms of quality, you are not going to receive the same number of visitors that a site with high quality will bring. Links that come from sites with related content will also count for more in terms of making your site list higher when a search is done for a related term.
Another important small business marketing tool for the internet is a little bit of web design knowledge. If you aren't designing your own website, then it can be useful to just learn enough of the basics of web design so that you can at least have discussions with your web designer about the SEO elements that concern your website. Once you've decided on the keywords that your business should target online, you want to be sure and include these in things like the page titles, headings, and Meta tags. Of course, you will also want to ensure that they are sprinkled liberally throughout your pages of content as well. Don't overuse them though, or your pages will start to look like spam. Quality content is always a key measure here and it will ensure that your site is embraced instead of blocked by the search engines.