Today I received a $50 domain inquiry for a top 3 word .com.

I’ll take a few moments to share a few thoughts for domain buyers and sellers.

I’ve received a few offers on this same domain over the last year, so I knew that I was not going to rollover and blindly accept this offer without doing a little research.

Just based on the previous domain inquiries and offers, the lowest price I was willing to accept was $25K.

As I do with every domain and right from the start, I also checked to see if the other domain extensions where registered, available, or developed.

And to my surprise and advantage as a seller, all other domain extensions were registered and a few had fully developed websites belonging to thriving businesses.

So I did what anyone should do, which is performing a few business searches to be sure that those businesses were legit.

It’s the silver bullet to SEO: Automation.

Every small business owner would love for SEO to plan, implement, execute, measure and sustain itself automatically.

However, the truth and reality is that it doesn’t. The End.

Okay, there is more to it that just stating the obvious and calling it a day.

This doesn’t mean that certain aspects of SEO cannot be automated.

In fact, there are many aspects of SEO that can be automated.

But the wisdom in automating SEO is knowing what to automate and how to go about automation.

Blinded by future rankings and the expected tsunami of traffic to be receive moments after signing their SEO agreement, business owners fall prey to paying large sums of money for services that either can’t be rendered or are rendered and leave their website severely penalized or de-indexed by search engines.

Too many times, business owners and businesses fall victim to the ole’ foolproof SEO automatic packages that tout overnight page one rankings.

Instead of taking the time to invest in SEO for the long haul, most business owners opt for the silver bullet approach.

Now, I can’t stop you or any other business owner in search of SEO strategies and services from falling prey to automating SEO.

While you can automate some of your SEO actions, there are some SEO actions that you should never automate.

With search engines closing in on 20 years, it’s safe to say that we are still in the early years of search although there have been many advancements along the way.

We’re just now turning yet another corner in search as social and mobile search both progress beyond their infancy.

Small businesses stand the greatest chance to capitalize on learning SEO because of the markets they serve. Small businesses tend serve geographic-specific audiences.

Nevertheless, search plays a key part to every business’ marketing and advertising, not only small businesses.

Whether a small, moderate, or critical percent, ranking your website, once considered optional, has become a mandatory task that businesses can no longer afford to ignore.

If you’re a small business owner with a website, then chances are likely that a good bit of your business, outside of word of mouth and referrals, comes from search engines.

Whether Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Yelp, AngiesList, or another source, small business owners that are looking to boost their local business presence are in great need of learning about small business SEO and local SEO.

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.

Without further ado, here are my top 20 SEO tips for small business to boost its website’s search rankings.

If your website depends on Facebook much like we humans depend on oxygen, then I suggest you better find a back air tank and real soon.

Gone are the days that you can share a post for the masses to see without paying one dime.

If you’ve had a personal or even a business page on Facebook, then you’ve figured out that not every post will reach your entire fan base when you choose not to pay.

For last 2 years, Facebook has cracked down on the promotion of business posts, and forcing businesses to use pay-per-post advertising.

Even when you do pay, only an additional segment of your entire fan base will see the posted message.

You have to pay premium pricing for your entire fan base to see your promoted message no matter how many likes or shares you receive for the promoted message.

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.

Is it worth spending thousands of dollars on pay-per-click (ppc) campaigns if my website is not ranking well? Can you provide me with any PPC campaign tips?

What a loaded question with a variety of stances to answer from.

Initially when I received this question from a potential customer, I was tempted to answer with a simple answer of yes and why.

However, I decided to delve a little deeper and volley a response back to the potential customer by way of another question.

We exchange emails a few times before arriving at the potential customer’s pain: a website that once ranked well is no longer ranking.

The idea of using PPC advertising and needed PPC campaign tips came about when the potential customer had been in contact with a competitor and industry colleague.

This colleague had indicated with proof that they were spending a good bit on PPC campaigns after their website had been penalized to no existence by the latest Google update.

Not ever having an experience with PPC, the potential customer was gung-ho about moving forward with their PPC effort in hopes of boosting their web rank.

But where should they start?