You Don't Have To Be An SEO Whizz To Improve Your Search Engine Rankings!

If you have an online business, you know the importance of a good search engine ranking. Whenever someone types in a keyword such as hardwood flooring or engineered flooring into a search engine like Google, if you are a flooring business you want to be on the first page of search results. Very few customers check the second or third pages of search results, so if you're serious about your business you need to know how to rank highly.

But how do you do it? The answer lies with search engine optimisation, or SEO as it's more commonly known.

Believe it or not, you don't have to be an SEO expert to get your business on the first page of search results - it's actually pretty simple. With that in mind, here are five simple SEO tips you can do to improve your search engine rankings and benefit from more traffic to your site and higher sales.


Tip #1 - Ensure your site is built correctly

Most hosted websites already do this, but if your website is custom-built, think about the folder structure, site map and html readability. You won't get brownie points for a nice-looking site, as search engines like sites they can crawl easily.

Also remember that search engines like words in URLs to be separated by hyphens or underscores. For example greatcakes.com/contact-us as it lets them recognise individual words. Keeping your products in word form is also essential, as it will help them rank in shopping searches. For example:
departmentstore.com/pink-dinner-plate rather than
departmentstore.com/product_id?u9u09u09.


Tip #2 - Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

Stop what you're doing and write down the top five keywords you want your website to be found for. Now ask your friends and family and write them down. Take this list and run some searches - where is your site ranked? Stop if you can't find your site after three pages - if you can't find it by then, don't expect anyone else to.

With that in mind, here are some simple things you can do on your site:

• Ensure your homepage contains 2 or 3 of your top keywords.
  
  
• Weave these keywords into your content across your site. When doing this, bear in mind that you need to get the keyword density on your page right. Make sure it reads and flows naturally and doesn't come across as spam.
  
  
• Use your keywords in the heading of your page - even better if you can get the keywords in the URL for that page too.
  
  
• Make sure you link to other relevant pages, within or outside your site, as part of your text too.

Tip #3 - Blog often

Blogging is a fantastic way to keep your customers informed of your products and services, but it plays a very important role in SEO too. Not only does it tell search engines that your site is kept up-to-date with regular, fresh content, it will increase the chances of other blogs linking to you - and this tells search engines that your site is well worth looking at. If you are continually creating news and interesting content you will be bumped up the search engine rankings and search "spiders" will crawl your site more often.


Tip #4 - Get social

Social media like Facebook and Twitter is playing a more important role in SEO too - especially Google+. The amount of shares, retweets, comments and likes tells search engines that what you are saying is important. It will drive more traffic to your site and increase the chances that what you are saying is indexed - especially if you can use the keywords highlighted above.


Tip #5 - Keep up to date with good SEO websites

The world of SEO is constantly changing, and for some people SEO is a full-time career. Google for example continues to change and evolve in the way it crawls websites, the way it ranks some sites above others and the way it looks at social media. Staying on top of its constant changes to its search algorithm can be a full-time job, but don't worry because there are some great sites out there which you can sign up to to receive updates on all the latest changes.

So there you have it - you really don't have to be an SEO whizz to boost your website up the search engine rankings. Just take some time to follow the tips above and your business will soon benefit from higher placing, higher traffic and higher sales!


Did you find this article helpful? Do you have any SEO tips to share to help improve search engine rankings? Please let me know/share them by using the comments section below.

Related articles:
10 Easy Steps To Boost Your SEO
Top SEO Do's And Don'ts
How To Improve Your SEO With Backlinks
The Seven Deadly SEO Sins
The 10 Week SEO Diet


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