Seven Tips to Improve Website Search Rankings

With more than 644 million estimated active websites on the internet today and growing, businesses need to work harder to get noticed online. For small businesses that don’t already have an established market presence this means finding ways to do more with less – and that’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play.
SEO is about making a company’s website as visible as possible when related information is requested through different search methods such as engines like Google or Bing. Most large, well-established and tech savvy companies have the advantage of prominence and often more budget to put into creating brand recognition.
If smaller businesses are looking for budget-friendly ways to maximize their chances of being found through search and attracting more traffic to their website, there are a few SEO-related tactics they can employ themselves with their website to help with that.
Whether a business is in the process of building a website in-house or working with an external developer and wanting to understand or speak their language here are seven tips for businesses to improve their site’s search rankings:

1. Secure Links – For SEO this means reaching out to industry associations, loyal clients and other complimentary businesses to encourage them to link to your site from areas like their blogs and resource pages. This is a signal that search engines, such as Google use in their rankings algorithms and will help to improve a website’s rankings.
2. Update content regularly – Ensuring content is unique, compelling and fresh is key to keeping the attention of website visitors. Consider blog posts, videos, images, webinars, eBooks, widgets, infographics, and primary research as ways to renew content on a regular basis.
3. Variety in content  – A Forrester study found that pages containing a mixture of text and video are 50 times more likely to rank higher in search results. Make sure to include more than one type of content sharing per web page.
4. Ensure the site is “social media optimized” – With the growing influence that social media has on a company’s relationship with potential and existing customers, it’s vital to ensure all website pages have the company’s social profile icons (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest). These icons encourage and make it easy to share the information and increase the chance of it being found in a search.
5. Use keywords in page titles - Ensure each website page has a title that is relevant and unique. The title should contain keywords that are related to how the company wants its website – or that page – to be found through search. (eg: the title “Dentist Toronto” would help a site rank for the term ‘dentist Toronto.'
   
6. Ensure main navigation links contain keywords - Again, focusing on keywords, it is important to include text links containing relevant keywords that reflect the way a business would want its primary pages to be found. (eg: if you’re a dentist and want to rank for  ‘Teeth Whitening’, links to the teeth whitening page should say ‘teeth whitening’.)
7. Offer unique and valuable content – Content that is unique, user-friendly and valuable encourages sharing and gives Google the social signals needed to believe that the page does in fact deserve to rank in their search results. In future, search engines will put much more trust in such social signals and those producing great content will be the net beneficiaries.

source: http://eglobiotrainingonlinemarketing.blogspot.com/2012_08_01_archive.html