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.

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.

One of the things about search engine optimization (SEO) that never ceases to amaze me is the sheer ability of a business to underestimate the long-term consequences of their zig-zag, one-time SEO decisions.

What I mean by zig-zag decisions is a business’ ability to zig to implement the hottest or latest fad in SEO only to zag when the next best SEO tactic arrives for all to partake.

One of the problems with this type of SEO strategy is that it leaves you open and vulnerable to the long-term impact of negative SEO should the tactic become too popular and deemed black-hat SEO by search engine algorithms.

Cheers to Google Authorship, having an image next to website search results, and all the added benefits it has brought my business over the past year.

If you have not a clue as to what I’m referencing, I invite you to read my recent post on the future of search engine optimization using Google Authorship.

As a major aspect of my content marketing strategy to gain greater visibility in search engines and an opportunity to increase click-through-rate (CTR) for search rankings, I implemented Google Authorship. I believe Google Authorship separates my website from my competition, adding a credibility boost to search rankings.

I’ve had Google Authorship implemented on my website almost a year now and amazed at the results.  

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.

If you’ve not used Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) search queries to track queries and impressions data for your website, then you are missing an opportunity to gain valuable SEO insight for and about your website, and increase its search rankings.

I know there are many of you that have tried free SEO tools in the past as well as paid SEO tools, but none can compare to GWT.

After all, GWT is a Google product and everyone is racking their brains out trying to figure out how to get their website to page one rankings or how to sustain page one rankings for their website.

For a free SEO tool, GWT packs a mean SEO punch and can hold it’s own as a phenomenal tool to use for webmasters and those with websites.

And today I’m going to let you in on a few secrets and how I use GWT to not only optimize my website, but to drive substantial search ranking changes and increases for my website in Google and other search engines.

Before we get too far down the path on this post on social signals, let me start by saying do not attempt to take anything from this post as the law of the land for manipulating search rankings.

In the last few days, I’ve received a few emails from potential customers in regards to certain SEO strategies they stumbled across on this blog not *working*.

Of course, not *working* is a vague term with wide boundaries depending upon whom you speak with.

As for the emails, potential customers had read a few blog posts making mention that social signals are important to search rankings for websites.

They then took to Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, and began posting content in an attempt to boost their website traffic and search rankings.

After a few posts and only days within their first couple of posts on each social network, potential customers were a bit frustrated by the following:

• Their website traffic did not increase
• Their search rankings decreased instead of increasing
• Their numbers on each of the social networks didn’t increase in any aspect

I mean, they had a few likes and a couple of followers, but they expected a monsoon of activity to boost their social signals and in return, increase search rankings for their website.

And of course without hesitation and not acknowledging the part they played, potential customers wrote me to inform me that I was fake and imposter SEO professional by their standards.