It seems like times are always tough for small businesses, but no time is worse than during a recession. During a recession, many businesses try to cut back on as much as possible, but when does cutting back start to hurt the company? One of the places this question is most often applied is to the question of SEO. Should a small business pay for SEO when money is tight?

Unfortunately, many small businesses axe their advertising budget first. While this can be a good place to save a little bit of money, if businesses completely cut their advertising, they will not be able to attract new clients. Without new clients, there’s little they can do to make more money. While word of mouth may help somewhat, it’s not as effective as a marketing blitz.

While web marketing is cheaper than doing offline marketing, there are still costs involved. However, you may get a much higher return on your investment since you’re able to more deeply analyze how well your marketing is doing. Since websites allow users to track where their traffic comes from, it’s easier to identify and cut any online marketing that is not working. To this end, small businesses should not immediately cut their SEO budget when times get tight.

Some small businesses may not have even invested in SEO yet, and these businesses may be asking why they should spend the money. However, those small business owners may not recognize just how great a return they can get on their SEO. A huge return on investment is everything in a recession, and doing SEO is ranked as one of the top ROI solutions.

By selecting specific keywords and phrases, you’re very specifically targeting your audience. While ads in magazines may get a lot of attention, you never really know if your target audience is viewing the ad or if it is being viewed by someone who will never purchase your product. SEO, however, makes certain your website is being viewed by those who are looking for what you offer. It brings in more than just quantity; it brings in quality visitors and provides them with information about your website right away.

When it comes to dealing with SEO, small businesses have a few choices. They can either handle the SEO themselves or they can hire a professional SEO company. The first is obviously the most budget-friendly; however, if you and your employees don’t understand the basics of doing SEO, you may end up wasting your time. Fortunately, you can learn the basics of SEO fairly quickly.

Paying a company to do SEO, especially if the company is thorough and completely redesigns your website from the ground up to be fully optimized, may be out of your price range. Many small businesses simply can’t afford this. However, having an expert in SEO look at your pages can be helpful. Outsourcing only part of the SEO process can be helpful. For example, you may want to hire a professional SEO writer to create content for your website after you determine the keywords yourself.

ght (c) 2009 Ajay Prasad

Organic traffic is the web based traffic which you are naturally able to attract to your site without using any short cuts or paid submissions for the promotion of a website. This traffic is unpaid listing at search engine or directories.

One method to increase the organic traffic is having as much unique content on your site as possible. Using keywords to write a powerful content gives an edge to your site. These keywords attract search engines to your site just as the bees are attracted to nectar.

Another unique method may be transcription of Pod casts as most of the search engines do not index your audio file but they do index quality rich text. A pod cast is an audio or video made available via web syndication. It can be a radio record or video for mobile downloading. Pod casting takes name from iPod, which is an immensely popular audio player by Apple computer, and broadcasting. Without the transcribed version, your pod casts may remain invisible to all except to those dedicated Internet users or to those who have already heard about it.

One may argue about the usability of the transcription when the audio or video is already available. But that is the whole point. In the video or audio if you have any unique content that will increase SEO. Some of the visitors do not bother to open the video, they rather read the content. Having a transcription of the video will serve two purposes. First it will convey what the same thing what the video wanted to convey and thus fulfill the purpose of the visitor. Secondly, if you have a transcribed version of the video or audio on a similar subject posted on another website the visitor will prefer your site!

Some people have difficulty in understanding the accent or pronunciation while others do not want to put in so much effort to listen as listening requires more concentration. And for the vision or hearing impaired people transcribed form of video/audio is no less than a boon.

There are some people who want to use the content of the video for further research or reference and they will automatically avoid your listing if you do not have the transcribed version. Some like to screen the text before downloading the pod cast. Lastly, for that category of people who like to listen and read simultaneously, the transcribed version along with the audio is found useful.

Then there is the question of cost-effectiveness. The transcription cost of pod casts can be reduced drastically by appropriate hiring and outsourcing. It should also be remembered that the organic traffic is natural one, so the amount spend on listing can be diverted to Transcription. In order to make your pod casts visible, for fun, profit and SEO, you must get your pod casts transcribed.

However, transcription of pod casts especially the audios is a difficult task and generally remains inaccurate. It is expensive and time consuming. With the help of correct transcribing partners, these problems can be reduced drastically who give the transcribed version in only three working days.