This article was originally published in the Aplus.net June Newsletter. It is meant to offer basic SEO tips so you can further optimize your website and receive increased traffic levels.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, plays a key role in driving traffic to websites. The following two sets of techniques, if applied carefully, can help raise a website’s ranking in search engines like Google™, Yahoo!®, and Bing™.

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If you run a small business and use a website to attract and inform customers, you might consider adding an online shopping cart to your sales campaign. Let’s find out if an eCommerce cart fits your business model, and what a shopping cart can do for your business!

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Now that you know how LinkedIn can help you and your small business, we’ll jump right into building an interesting and effective user profile and a business profile.

Building a personal profile

To build a complete profile, LinkedIn recommends:

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Facebook took the social media world by storm back in 2004, before many of us had even heard the term “social media.” Today we’ll cover what Facebook is and why it could enhance your marketing strategy.

What is Facebook?

Facebook is a social media platform that allows users to:

• Create in-depth personal profiles,
• Share short status updates (similar to Twitter),
• “Friend” other users to see their content and updates,
• Write on friends’ bulletin-board-like “walls,”
• Chat via built-in mail and instant messaging systems,
• Join user-created common-interest groups, and,
• Become “fans” of a company, product and brand “pages.”

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Now that we’ve covered the definition of social media and social media etiquette for small businesses, you’re probably itching to test out your newfound knowledge. Let’s get started with Twitter!

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