Don't know how to build a company around your hobby or idea?
Are you stuck trying to figure out how to incorporate? Or which structure is right for your business?

DocStoc has made available a free course to help you out. One of our Pepperdine Graduate School of Business alumni, Jason Nazar (founder of docstoc) has made this course available for free. Highly recommend for you to check it out.

How to Start a Business The Complete Guide

Here's a link to his Personal Blog

SEO: How to Primer on a Bootstrap Budget

Many of my friends of mine my friends have spent thousands of dollars on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is meant to be a step by step to the most important things you need to know/do about SEO. You can do this yourself, so no reason to pay thousands of dollars to someone else to do it.

Location information:

Google doesn't use geotags, but Bing does. Go to www.geo-tag.de/generator/en.html and generate your location data. Copy & paste this info into your pages.

Make sure your physical address matches the data on your site.

Site maps helps both users and search engines navigate through your site. Include plenty of text reference which points to other pages in your site.

There are 2 types of sitemaps, XML & HTML. 

Joomla, WordPress and Drupal automatically generate sitemaps. Look at xml-sitemaps.com if you need more help.

Back links. Links help search engines find your site. If nobody cares to link to your site, why should search engines care. There are many tools to do this, but most of these tools don't work (show you all the links pointing to your site).

• type in "linkdomain: domain.com" on yahoo.com 
• type in "linkdomain: domain.com" on google.com
• Majesticseo
• robots.txt contains a link to your sitemap location. You can submit sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Similar procedure for Bing. You need to verify ownership of your site before being able to add sitemap.

In addition to organic search index listings, you need to add Local Index (Google Places, Bing local, Yahoo local).

• Search your business on Google Places, Bing local, Yahoo local...chances are your business already exists. Make sure you create a listing for each location.
• Go to these URLs:
• Google Places
• Bing Businessportal
• Yahoo Local
• Add as much information as possible (ie. business website, pictures, staff, keyword text, coupons, promotions, logos, videos etc)
• verify your business
• get customers to post reviews
• Geographic location is important. If you are outside of the center of a city, this can hurt you.
• Submit your site to UBL.org, they will submit your site to other online directories ($130 annual fee)