As with most business and online strategies, seeing results from your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts may take time. While your efforts may not produce drastic improvements in your website's search results ranking overnight, every little bit helps. When executed properly, your company's SEO strategy can produce sustainable, short and long-term results that can drive online success.

Until your site is indexed by search engines, it will not appear on search results pages; this can take months or even years. Instead of waiting for that day, take a proactive approach by registering the homepage of your website with the most popular search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Ask. This speeds up the process considerably, and many websites and online applications will register your site for little or no cost.

If you've ever performed an online search, you've probably experienced frustration as a result of a run-in with black hat SEO. Doorway pages, hidden text and keyword-stuffing are all unscrupulous methods of boosting site ranking. Have you ever searched for information and generated search results that had absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand? Clicking on these links leads you into a labyrinth of misinformation and may even expose your computer to unwanted intrusion. Irritating, isn't it? Yes, the site may have made it to the first page of search results, but does it meet your needs? Absolutely not! These methods waste your time and that of your would-be site visitors.

Regardless of your industry or target market, keywords play a vital role in the optimization process. Your website should include keyword-rich content in both body text and image tags. Like most things, however, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. You need not include the same keywords over and over again within a single sentence or even in every sentence; this adversely impacts readability and makes your site appear unprofessional in the eyes of site visitors.

If your online presence has not yet been established, you may wish to consider whether or not your domain name is working for you. A website's domain name plays a large role in its visibility on search results pages. Ideally, your domain name should be a single, highly relevant keyword. If the only available domain name contains two words, consider adding a hyphen between them. Otherwise, many search engines (including Google) cannot distinguish both words; consequently, non-hyphenated domain names carry no advantage in establishing search rankings. Again, this is a drastic move and should be used only as a last resort and in the absence of a strong online presence.

Social networks are becoming the go-to platform for online promotion and commerce for home-based businesses, a new study shows. Though websites have provided a relatively inexpensive way for businesses to efficiently reach prospects since the 1990s, many home-based business owners still believe that they are difficult to create and costly to set up and maintain. As a result, less than half of home-based businesses have a website.

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