There is a reason why businesses out there have gotten as big as they are, they think like a big business. When you think like a big business you start to think outside the box a bit and things start to unravel. Search marketing has allowed smaller businesses to go head to head with large corporations through search. All it really takes is a proactive aggressive approach to market your business online and any small to medium size business can take away some market share from the big companies in their space.

Search engines have changed almost everything in the way we spread our message as businesses. Before the internet came around it was offline marketing, radio and television. Those choices were deemed much too expensive in recent years, which caused many newspapers and magazines to crumble in the wake of the recession. Depending on how deep your pockets are some offline marketing will always be important to keep the branding of your business moving in the right direction but overall search has become the top marketing choice for many. When your audience sees your ad in a magazine you sort of build a different type of credibility in your industry. Overall internet marketing is where a small or medium sized business can really get the most bang for their buck.

The beauty of it all is that many small and medium size businesses have websites, websites that might have been sitting around for close to ten years and business owners don’t even realize how much power they have in their finger tips. A website with ten years of age has some really nice age power and with relatively little effort that website could start to move around on the internet quite a bit. Whether a business owner likes it or not the landscape has changed drastically over the last few years. If your competition is starting to put aside budget for search engine marketing you should as well. Things like optimizing a website for search is right up there with turning on the lights at the office. Companies large and small shouldn’t even think about it anymore. It just needs to be done at this point without question. SEO’s counterpart, link building is a must no matter who you are. Don’t look at it like a science project but rather building pathways to your website. The more quality pathways you have the more visitors you can build up over time. The concept is simple, just put out good material and over time people will generate those links for you naturally. Think like a big business! What would a big business do online? If you don’t have the budget to compete that is ok. There is plenty you can be doing that does not necessarily require a great deal of money, just time.

Make the time to create a community surrounding your business and engage with your audience online. Create online promotions surrounding your business and push them through the social networks to create an awareness surrounding your business that you might have not had in years past. Just because your business might be smaller in size and power doesn’t mean you can’t compete on the same web platforms that others are using every single day to market to the same exact audience you are targeting.

The internet has a great deal of space for everyone to brand themselves. The opportunity is there to grow any business you just have to start using it. Take the time and learn the online space and take an aggressive approach to marketing yourself or your business online. We think once you start to think like a big business you will be pleasantly surprised at the outcome of your efforts.

Firefox

I don’t know if Firefox is officially the browser of SEO’s but if not – it should be. You can download it here. The award-winning Web browser is better than ever. You can browse the internet with confidence – Firefox protects you from viruses and spyware. Enjoy improvements to performance, ease of use and privacy. Firefox empowers you to browse faster, more safely and more efficiently than with any other browser. And then there is the extensions that make this browser invaluable to SEO’s …

SEO Quake

If I had to lose all but one of my SEO tools – this would be the one I’d keep which is why it gets listed first. This little tool allows users to quickly look at the top 10 results in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and within seconds see all the PageRank, indexed page numbers, backlinks to that page, domain backlinks, the age of the site and much much more.

This tool doesn’t provide any revolutionary information, as all it’s data that can be accessed directly. However it reduces the time to complate tasks drastically. It then provides easy links to more detailed information. A fantastic tool. Oh, and it also adds a line through all nofollowed links. Very handy when link building.

Web Developer

With this tool we’re getting a bit more advanced. For those of you who understand coding or are learning this tool is incredible. It allows for quick testing and viewing of a site for it’s structure including image info, table and cell information, W3C compliance, CSS details and MUCH MUCH more.

Search Status

This is another tools with many uses. On the surface it simply displays PageRank, Alexa and Compete rank and mozRank data but with a right-click of the icon you get access to a whole sleugh of additional information including fast links to whois, the robots and sitemap files, keyword density information, Archive.org info and it’ll even highlight nofollow links.

Now this is the main sleugh of extensions I have installed for Firefox. This isn’t to say that’s all there is and I can’t stress enough the benefits of visiting https://addons.mozilla.org/ and looking for more useful extensions specific to your needs (RSS, Twitter, coding, etc.) I have about a dozen more installed than are listed here but those above are the main Firefox SEO tools I use daily.