Running a business can be a difficult venture for many reasons, however one of the hardest challenges for a local business is to get recognized by its target market. With fierce competition in California, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the many ways to cut through the noise and reach your target customers without spending a small fortune to do it. Search Engine Optimization has a lot of benefits for local businesses, it helps drive traffic to the web, is cost-effective, and can be done by just about anyone given who is willing to put in the time and effort and spend a weekend learning about the finer points of SEO. At this point you might be asking, “why should I use SEO for my business?”. The answer is simple, with just a small daily time investment, you can have results on the first pages of search engines like google and yahoo. If you have an online store, your sales could grow exponentially as the number of hits you receive through search engine traffic grows with your SEO practices over time. The best part is, all of this can cost you literally nothing; there are no programs you NEED to buy, no seminars you HAVE to attend, the information is available for free on the web. All you have to do is be willing to put in a little bit of time every day at SEO to see considerable returns. This form of marketing is especially important in crowded markets. In states like California, SEO can help cut through the noise of other local competition, as well as open your small niche store to a wide internet market. In a nut-shell, search engines determine how to rank pages by relevance using specific keywords. Your goal is to optimize your site in such a way that the search engine’s will pick up on the key words you target and rank them higher in terms of relevance. For example, if your business sold motorcycle accessories, you may want to target keywords such as “motorcycle helmets” or “motorcycle jackets”. After that is complete you begin the journey of improving the SEO of your site, before long searching “motorcycle helmets” will return your website on the first page, dramatically increasing your traffic.