People often associate branding with money. Lots and lots of money. Most of the time, if you try to run a branding campaign you think of companies like Nike, companies that will have to pay for intense and premiere campaigns. But small business owners don't have that kind of money to brand themselves in similar fashion. Fortunately, there are online methods to brand your small business. Many SEO experts would conclude that a full-scale SEO or PPC campaign is the only way to brand yourself online. SEO can play a role in branding, but you can engage it strategically so you're spending less time and less money while still building brand recognition. What are you branding?

First you need to know what it is you are branding. Is it your company name? Your products? Your services? Your personal name or online handle? What is it that you want people to remember? If you're a blogger your name is definitely important. So is your blog name. If you're a business then your business name will be important, as might be your products if they are exclusively yours. The point is, before you start spending money to brand yourself you first need to determine what you have that needs to be branded. Now you have your starting place. How to use SEO for branding SEO is a great way to brand your business, products, services or blog. Since you're not going after high-volume keywords, the cost of using SEO for branding is relatively minimal. The idea is to make sure you come to the top of the results when someone searches for whatever it is you're trying to brand. The goal here is to make sure your brand is prominent in the results so you begin to build that brand recognition. The easiest way to do this kind of branding is to simply edit your title tags to include your brand name. If it's your company name, then put your company name first and foremost in your title tag. If you're branding own name, put that there. Most SEO professionals will tell you not to put your business name in the front of your title tag.

If you're targeting non-branded keyword searches I fully agree. However if your focus is on building brand name recognition, then you'll have to sacrifice some keyword real estate for your brand. The goal here is to make sure people see your company name, or whatever it is you're branding, whenever your site comes up in the search result. This will also help ensure that when someone does a search for your branded name they'll find you up top. It will still be important to optimize your site for non-branded keywords, however. The more keywords you rank for on the first page, the more opportunities you have to build brand recognition. Look for opportunities to optimize for your pages for some of the long-tail keyword phrases. Being ranked on those often generates more highly targeted visitors so branding to that audience is even better. How to use PPC for branding Another thing you can do to brand yourself is to buy cheap ads through Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can do this for your name, products or even specific keyword searches.