This is where the field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques can help you. Most SEO customers are B2B or B2C companies that make money selling products or services online. Based on the competitive nature of e-commerce and lead generation efforts, SEO for these companies can be expensive and time consuming. For the solitary business professional, however, several small scale SEO practices can be undertaken which may get you enough traffic to your site (or blog) to keep the money coming in.

Here are some hints for getting more visitors to your blog with SEO techniques.

1. Think Local. Most business professionals and freelancers will be working out of a certain geographical area. If you’re using your local city name in your blog posts, you are going to get classified in search engines for those phrases. If you leave out regional terms, you are effectively competing with everyone in the world who does what you do.
2. Become a subject matter expert. If you practice a specific field of copyright law, or do marketing consulting for beverage companies, you definitely want to talk about those topics in your blog. If there are aspects of your work that are common to many customers, blogging about it will get you visitors who have the same issues.
3. Find out what people are looking for. The Google Keyword tool can help you find blog topics related to your profession. Even if there are only a few hundred searches a month for your trade, one click can create thousands of dollars in new business, depending on your field.
4. Build keywords into your titles. Most blog platforms like Blogger and Wordpress will show your blog title as the title of your posting page. Titles are very important in the world of SEO, and can be the difference between getting found on the first page of Google. Over 80% of searchers don’t even bother to get to the next page of results, so good titles are important.
5. Get other people to link to your site. Search engines like Google value links from other sites as endorsements. You can start by getting links from fellow bloggers, but if you can get links from news sources you will be considered more credible.
6. Use social media. For every new blog post, you can submit yourself to social media outlets like Digg. Sometimes the summary of your post on Digg will hit the search engines in a few hours, even if your own site doesn’t get ranked. You can use Twitter to let your followers know that you’ve done another post, and Facebook to link to it as well.
7. If all else fails, buy paid traffic. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter (for Bing) all sell sponsored search packages, and there is no minimum spend per day. If you’re a freelancer with a niche service, your ad may show up among a small group of other ads, which is cheaper than being found for high demand terms.

There are also plenty of SEO tools you can use to find out where you rank in the search engines. As a word of warning, it can take several months to get your blog into competitive positions in the search engines, so getting started right away is generally the best course of action. As you develop you blog, you will be able to master techniques that can “ping” other networks every time you post, but the real key to getting found involves having plenty of fresh material. As you build an audience for your subject matter, you may find that word-of-mouth referrals take over for your SEO, but having a good groundwork will get you out in front of the free traffic that is looking for your unique abilities.

One of the better ways to get an audience is through market research, and the top free market research tool online is the Google Keyword Tool (AKA the Google Adwords Keyword Tool). This tool actually tells you what people are looking for, and even gives seasonal search trends information if you know how to look for it. The keyword tool also suggests alternative keywords that may get you an even bigger audience, or new set of topics with a guaranteed interest base.

For example, let’s say that you want to get more readers who are interested in “online marketing.” Using the Google keyword tool, you would type in the phrase, and make sure to click the box for “use synonyms.” After waiting about 10 seconds for results, you should get two lists. The first will be more relevant matches, and the second will have related terms. There are also columns for local and global search volume. If you click on the top of either column, the results are sorted by popularity.

Our search revealed the top 10 terms to be:

online marketing
online marketing business
online advertising marketing
online marketing promotion
online marketing services
online marketing company
online marketing media
online marketing search
online marketing strategy
online marketing agency

Meanwhile, the top 10 related terms were:

marketing
internet marketing
business marketing
marketing advertising
website marketing
branding
email marketing
internet marketing tools
marketing services
web marketing

For a blogger, the keyword tool can be a goldmine, since the June 2009 results from this tool showed that “internet marketing” gets 1.8 million searches per month vs. 673,000 for “online marketing.” For a power blogger who is looking for an audience, either one of these terms would be fine for inclusion into a blog, but one term gets nearly 3 times the audience of the other one. Aside from the small sample of results here, there are also several dozen keywords and variations in the rest of the list that make for good blog topics.

The keyword tool also lets you see a diverse selection of ideas and desires built around these words. You can look through the list of search results and find out how many people in your sample base are thinking about something else when they type in “online marketing,” and you can hone your subject to capture the audience that is best for you. If you are blogging about “online marketing strategies” you can feed the keyword back into the search tool, un-check the synonyms box, and see more relevant results.

There are also ways to use the keyword tool to see the relative value of a word or phrase. For people who make money off their blogs with Google Adsense, this can be a critical way of increasing the average payment for every click. Under the dropdown that says “choose columns to display” you can pick the “show estimated average CPC” column, and you will see a relative keyword cost next to each phrase. In the June 2009 results, “online marketing programs” has an average cost per click of $13.72, so that may be an attractive one to go after. Conversely, if you are an eccentric billionaire and want someone to visit your blog, you can actually buy this term on Adwords and send people there.

The “Search Volume Trends” column is also quite valuable for people who are blogging about seasonal topics. (You should always mouse over the months on the graph, because they are not presented in a January to December format.) It would appear that marketing terms peak in May and June, but drop in August. Given that blog postings sometimes take a few weeks to get traction in the search engines, you can plan out your topics so they get cached and indexed in the search engines during these peak periods. If your blog gets picked up and indexed more quickly, you could even have a series based around a topic that keeps people interested and gets more search saturation.

Prior to keyword tools like Google, research was based on surveys and focus groups. The problem these information gathering methods is that they can be skewed by the way questions are written, the presence of dominant focus group members, or even the attractiveness of the person asking the questions. People might even be afraid of expressing their true opinions to someone on the other end of a phone. In some cases, a market research firm may be told to come back with a certain conclusion, and it can structure questions and focus groups to return the “right” answer. Search engine queries, for the time being, are based on actual user interests. Nobody feels the need to impress a search engine or lie to it , because the engine is delivering results that they “want.” When it comes to picking an audience for your blog, of finding out a level of interest, keyword research tools will likely give you a better sample than any opinion poll, and give your real numbers at the same time.

Once your blog gets a respectable audience, you can also use keyword research to measure your own popularity. For instance, you could put your own name, or the name of your blog, into the tool to see how many people are looking for you. Just remember that your core audience already remembers your URL or has you bookmarked, so the results you see are more likely to be people who have heard about you and want to know more. Even better, you can track the popularity of your ideas if you have original topics that are not based on current keyword trends. Every day, people read blogs and then go back to the search engines to research concepts that they have learned about, and you can go back into the tool the next month to see if your concepts are gaining a market share. For people who are blogging to change the world “one reader at a time,” there is a lot to be said for this kind of intellectual market intelligence.