Well, everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off checking their web analytics and webmaster tools to see if their website has been hit by Google Panda 4.0 update or in strong recovery mode.

In a tweet from Matt Cutts over the weekend, it is official that Google started rolling out the Panda 4.0 update.

If you own and operate a website and been keeping tabs on SEO in general, then you know that search marketing has changed quite drastically with the latest Panda and Penguin updates over the last few years.

It’s been a while since we’ve covered a few search ranking factors for boosting one’s website search results across major search engines.

Well, today, we’re going to address the top 20 SEO tips that website owners can implement and execute to ensure that their website’s search rankings remain highly visible or boost your way into page one search rankings across major search engines.

Here are my top 20 SEO tips for small businesses to boost their website’s search rankings.

It’s been known for quite a bit of time the importance of a domain name and its ability to provide businesses with search ranking advantages.

If business owners would have known the outcome of the Internet and the .com craze of the mid 90’s some twenty years ago, then I’m almost certain that most would give thousands of dollars to go back in time to have purchase their premium .com of choice when they were free or cost a few hundred dollars.

There were millions and millions of domains floating around with little to no financial investment.

You simply had to be a risk taker, gambler, or saw just a glimpse of what the Internet could and would become.

It’s always difficult to predict and know the future from where we stand today.

However, it is much easier to take a 20/20 glance back down memory lane and see all the signs pointing to your current position.

Fast forward from decades ago, and it looks like history might be repeating itself again with the second coming of new gTLDs or new domain extensions.

By time its all said and done, there will be nearly 1,900 new domain extensions in the open market.

For a small business, the local market for their line of business can be quite a competitive and saturated market.

From traditional advertising avenues to search marketing and other online advertising venues, small businesses are trying to get the biggest bang for their buck when it comes to driving new business.

For some, it’s a matter of keeping the doors open.

But like any small business that relies on the web for new customers or their website to act as a 24 by 7 by 365 online salesperson, there is always the question of what is the most effective path to take in optimizing one’s website for local SEO.

One crowd believes in using a single domain to rank local SEO, while others believe in multiple domains to boost local SEO rankings.

So which party is right or wrong? Or are both parties right and wrong?

Today, I’ll take a moment to outline a few local SEO scenarios for small businesses and also discuss the pros and cons of local SEO using single domains and multiple domains.

I get a kick out of potential and existing customers who are very skeptical of my SEO process here at Kickstart Commerce.

Some are surprised to know that I hire writers to create content as a part of my content marketing strategy.

And even more shocking, potential customers are shocked to hear that I’ll hire writers as a part of their SEO strategy to rank their website.

I’m very transparent in sharing how I will go about positioning and optimizing websites for the greatest chance and opportunity for increase search rankings.

I take pride in sharing simple on-page optimization techniques and practical SEO tactics that even the most technically challenged person could implement with little guidance.

In addition, I allow potential and existing customers into my most intimate thoughts about keyword selections as well as freely provide additional insight into keywords they may have overlooked or forgotten.

And to really surprise potential customers, I walk each through my process for how I optimize my very own personal and business websites, including showing real-life keywords that are ranking and generating revenue.

Like most domainers, I’ve been watching and reading about the new gTLDs, also known as general top-level domain names or new domain extensions, for over a year now, following TheDomains.com, Rick Schwartz, Morgan Linton, and other domainers.

I’ve also followed GoDaddy’s new extensions promotion as well as 1And1.com’s new gTLD promotional commercial.

1And1.com created a great commercial that was well positioned, but what a waste of time and money in my opinion.

To think that 1And1.com wasted nearly 50 million dollars in one-time new gTLD advertising just baffles me to no end.

And for the record, I’ve not seen that same 1And1.com commercial advertising for new gTLDS since my post.

But I digress.

Personally, I’ve taken the stance that domain names, especially premium and super-premium keyword domain names, using new gTLDs are not going to be as successful as .com domain names.

One of the things that drives me up a wall and back as an SEO professional is to have both potential and existing customers solely focus on the number of backlinks their competitors have achieved based on SEO tools.

I love SEO tools and I do use my fair share of SEO tools, but I realize that SEO tools cannot replace the hard work and effort that I must put into achieving and sustaining my rankings.

I use SEO tools as a gauge to monitor what SEO tactics are and are not working, but these SEO tools are not the end all, be all for how my website ranks across major search engines.

In most cases, people that are benchmarking using SEO tools are clearly wasting their time.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to benchmark and use SEO tools such as Advanced Web Ranking, Ahrefs.com, Moz, and OpenSiteExplorer.org to measure one’s website or compare one’s website to their competition.

The problem I have with customers using SEO tools is that most potential customers and customers are headed down the wrong or deceptive SEO path and proclaim SEO tools as the holy grail of SEO.

And why is this so bad, you ask? Well, any little discrepancy in the numbers or data shown by their desired SEO tool of choice causes such potential and existing customers to participate in reactive SEO, chasing things that don’t matter while neglecting to focus and stay the course executing sound SEO principles.

We all must remember that SEO is as fickle as the wind in general and especially can become a slippery slope when we start trying to use tools to reactively benchmark link building strategies.

That said, I wish most potential and existing customers would really take to heart and understand wholeheartedly what about about to say in the next paragraph.