As you may know, this will be my last post on www.johnthought.com. I have decided that I need to focus on other tasks right now and can say, I have thoroughly enjoyed writing this blog and interacting with all of you this past year.

For my last post, I thought I would summarize all I have learned in a nutshell from my own experiences. I have summarized this down to five points. I didn’t invent the strategies, but in my experience, they are the most useful.

This post is for those of you looking to start your own online business or help you ramp up your existing SEM strategies. I hope this helps. If you have any questions or comments, I can be reached at jjk701@gmail.com. Ciao!

1. Register your profile.
Google, Yahoo and Bing all have a system to verify your website. They often involve a call from the company or a letter in the mail with the verification steps. It doesn’t take long at all and with all of the “phishing” sites out there, people are getting nervous.

2. Put pictures of your business on your site and keep track of your information.
Use local site listing services like Localeze and infoUSA. Local listing content managers search the internet to find pictures, reviews and any information they can on your business. Upload your own pics to be sure that they are quality. Also be sure to add a phone number and your business address. If you have multiple locations, have different landing pages for them.  Be sure these are meta-tagged in your site code and throughout the site text and not just the images.

3. Ask customers for reviews.
Most local content sites are fine with you asking your customers to review your site. On your contact page or after they place an order, ask them then.  These reviews will add a sense of credibility to your site and may drive future customers. Even bad reviews can be good for searches. No business is perfect, try and take the good with the bad.

4. Think like the searcher/customer.
Pretend you know nothing about your own business, then start typing in words for the products or services you are looking for. Also, be sure to see what comes up when you are doing the keyword search. What words are you main competitors using? Don’t get stuck by just using the popular keywords. What you think someone will type when looking to buy something may not be what you would type.

5. Treat your customers right
Everyone knows that they need to treat the customer right, but when many businesses never see they customer they tend to treat like a number. Treat all customer inquiries and requests as if they are there in front of you. With all of the review sites and social networking pages, the time it takes for good, or bad, news to travel is down to minutes. Good news spread fast, bad news, faster.

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