With any kind of luck I’ll be live streaming this session from 6:30-8:30pm Eastern time, Thursday, March 21 on Ustream.

I did! I did get to stream it!

If you didn’t make it to the Hudson Library and need an SEO refresher, you might give these videos a look:

I’m speaking as part of the Hudson Library speaker series they do.

This has become a very well regarded series in our region. They always have really cool people speaking.

I’ve been lucky to be part of the series 3 times now.

Tonight, I’m doing a presentation on: The top 10 things you should know about SEO for your small business.

I’m seriously considering doing a live stream of the session from my phone on my Ustream channel. The biggest issue with that is what kind of Verizon service they have there. If I can get a solid 4G signal I might just try it.

If I stream it live I’ll post the link to the live session at the top of this blog post and I’ll tweet it out.

This is a two hour session. So getting to 10 points in two hours makes for a bit of a whirlwind. But it should also make it pretty fun.

I thought I’d wet your whistle for the event by listing the top 10 of these points.

I’m pretty much just going to bullet point them here. But we’ll go into more detail of each at the event.

OK. Here you go the top 10 things your small business should know about about SEO:

1.  SEO has never, in the history of SEO, been harder for small businesses. Google would rather rank a large brand or a big publisher. Just type in your major key phrases and see if this isn’t true for you. But there are things you can do. Read on…
2. For your first line of key phrase research defense: Use the Google and YouTube suggested search listings. And also use Google’s Related searches at the bottom of the search results page. Like these:
   

   Youtube suggested search

   

   Google Suggested Search

   

   Google Related Searches

3. Use YouTube! This is the absolute best way to break into the search results at Google and YouTube. Google loves Youtube and still loves the small guy for video.
4. Don’t give up on optimizing your content. Use your targeted key phrase in 3 primary places:
   * Your page title.
   * Your body content.
   * Link text (anchor text) from other pages back to the page you are optimizing.
   If you do those things you are ahead of the vast majority of people.
5. Create content people want to talk about. Content that people share in social media, comment on and link to is going to be content that ranks well. You just have to be brilliant, that’s all
6. Claim and optimize your Local Listing on Google Places for Business
   

   Google Places for Business

   This is the most important thing you can do in local search.

7. Claim and optimize your Yelp listing. These listings appear in Bing Local search results.
   

   Claim Your Business Listing On Yelp

   Bing uses Yelp for its local listings. So having a good local listing at Yelp is going to help you on Bing.

8. Understand why people buy things. If you understand why they buy, you can understand what will motivate people to think you have compelling content. Read this article: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2118094/makes-people-reasons

9. Use Slideshare to get ideas for content. There’s a ton of great content over there… probably in your industry. You can use those presentations as inspiration for content for your site.

10. Write in-depth, long, thoughtful articles. Google is looking for the most relevant content. That is usually the most thorough article. “How to” articles are great. You probably will have better luck creating one great article a month versus 20 quick articles.

So there you have it: The Top 10 Things You Should Know About SEO For Your Small Business.