If you are ready to jump start your business, September is the time to do it, and there are some pretty high powered bloggers who want to help you out.

Jump Start Your Business with the b5media Business Bloggers

The b5media contest is open to businesses who are less than a year old and entry does involve a bit of work. You have to answer the following questions:

1. What’s your business idea?
2. Who is on your business team - in other words, who is going to make this idea work?
3. When did you start your business? Or when do you plan to start your business? What is your time frame for success?
4. Why is this business going to be a success?
5. Why should we pick you as the winner?

It is worth the work, though. The b5media Prize Pack is valued at more than $2000 including free financial software, merchandise and valuable business advice from the business professionals at b5media! There are also two additional runner-up packages that are pretty nice too. Get all the details at TaxGirl’s post on the Jump Start Your Business contest.

David Airey’s $4,000 Blog Anniversary Giveaway

David Airey has one of the best design blogs going and he is celebrating one year of sharing his graphic design thoughts, commentary and tips with us by having a huge - and I mean huge - celebration. There are over $4,000 worth of prizes up for grabs and you only have another week to get your entry in.

I particularly like the prizes in the online advertising category and would love to win any of them:

• 728px by 90px banner ad for 30 days above the fold on The Blog Experiment.
• 125px by 125px image ad for 30 days on Smart Wealthy Rich.
• Ad icon located site-wide in the top left of Blog-Op, courtesy of Chris Lodge.
• 30 day text link ad shown site-wide on Contest Blogger.
• 125px by 125px image ad for 30 days on Freelance Folder.

If you haven’t checked out these two awesome contests, I highly recommend you do it before time runs out.

As a freelancer or small business owner, you often find yourself wearing many hats - often out of necessity! While I am working on taking my business to the next level this fall and outsourcing some of the tasks that I do not love or do well, I am still basically a one person shop.

Here are five of my favorite sites to visit when I am looking for advice, forms, and facts:

Freelance Switch

Apart from the fact that Freelance Switch is one of the best-looking sites out there, it is also jam-packed with essential information that freelancers need. There is a job board, freelance rate calculator, and a forum for working through ideas, getting advice and sharing information. The Freelance Switch blog also features some of the most useful tips for freelancers, such as:

• 101 Ideas to Get More Freelance Work and Generate New Client Leads
• Top 10 Signs That You May Be Charging Too Little
• 10 Biggest Mistakes That Freelancers Make and How to Avoid Them

AllBusiness

AllBusiness is a magazine style site with a combination of industry specific advice, journals, business blogs, forms, business directory, and loads of information. The site can be a little overwhelming because there is so much there, but if you have an idea of what you are looking for, a quick search will most likely get you going in the right direction.

StartupNation

StartupNation is another magazine style site that is primarily for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. In addition to resources, articles, blogs and plenty of how-tos, StartupNation has a forum for discussing issues that entrepreneurs deal with daily. I particularly like the list of 10 Steps to Open for Business.

Entrepreneur.com

Entrepreneur magazine did a really nice job combining the strength of their traditional print magazine with the new media of blogs, video, and two way conversation in their online site. If you are looking for business ideas Entrepreneur 0ffers small business guides such as 25 Businesses You Can Start and Run From Home and 10 Free Starting a Business Books.

Inside Small Business

Inside Small Business is the blog and resource site for Logoworks. Between the blog and the newsletter there are some really helpful articles, but the most useful part of the site is by far the 20+ free business forms that you can download.

One day last week I got a call from a client and she wanted to know why her business web site did not appear on the front page of Google when she typed in a specific search phrase. For the sake of this discussion we’ll just say that she was wondering why her Widgets site did not appear on the front page of Google when she typed in “widgets in walla walla.”

“Walla Walla,” I asked? There is no mention of Walla Walla anywhere on your site. Never has been.

So I spent the next 30 minutes explaining to her that the search engines don’t have some special mind reading powers. If you want the search engine to find you based on a certain phrase, that phrase has to be somewhere on your site - preferably in more than one relevant place in the copy.

I try to educate my clients on the SEO basics:

1. Meaningful title tag
2. Keywords that are relevant and show up in the content
3. Solid Description
4. Keyword rich alt tags on images
5. Keyword rich descriptor tags on links
6. Plenty of original, well written, keyword rich (not spammy) content
7. Good site organization with clean, up to date coding
8. Don’t pay $99.99 for submission into “500 search engines”
9. Your typical small business web site will take about 6 months to really get anywhere on Google organically - they just don’t have the back links, page rank and update frequency to get there any faster.
10. If you are going to do a Google Adwords campaign or other paid sponsorship campaign, you really need to educate yourself and enlist the services of a professional.

And while I do my best to hammer home that doing the basics, mixed with good quality content and revisiting this list every few months to tweak, I still seem to get the same question - “Why doesn’t my site show up #1 for widgets in walla walla?”

I would love to know how you educate your clients on SEO. What tips do you give them? What are some of your favorite articles on SEO for the average small business client?