Ten Powerful But Simple SEO Tips

Every business with an online presence should make Search Engine Optimization a top priority. At its most basic level SEO means utilizing techniques that will boost your rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) so you will get more visitors to your website.

At the more advanced levels SEO will also include advanced keyword research, natural language processing and the architecture of your website and of course onsite and offsite link building.

If you're new to all of this SEO stuff, here are ten SEO tips that can start you on your journey to having a successful online business;

1 - Keyword Research

Every campaign should start by doing the proper keyword research first for your niche and then placing appropriate keywords throughout your website including:

The titles of your pages
Your URLs
The naming of your images
Headline Tags
Don't make the fatal mistake however of "keyword stuffing" otherwise you could be labeled as a spammer.

2 - Link Back To Yourself

Internal links to other pages of your site utilizing keyword anchor text is one of the basic elements of SEO. It is an easy way to boost traffic to other pages of your website and to also increase your internal page rank structure. Avoid excessive linking, you don't want to annoy your visitors and to also get blacklisted as a spammer.

3 - Create Sitemaps

You should create two sitemaps, one HTML version for your human visitors and an XML sitemap for the robots. Sitemaps make it easier for your visitors both human and robots to find all your content.

4 - Create Friendly URLs

Make your URLs search engine friendly by using appropriate keywords in your URL strings. If you create a page about blue widgets, name the page blue-widgets.php (or whatever your page extension is)

5 - Avoid Flash

Although Google is getting a lot better at reading flash files, I still would not advise using it for your website navigation and/or as the main content area of your website.

6 - Use Alt Tags

The search engine spiders can only search text; not images or photos. Name your images using keywords using the "alt description" tag. Also be cognizant of the visually impaired visitors that may be visiting your website using a text reader. Use alt tags that are appropriate for your images.

7 - Content is King

The content on your website needs to be fresh, interesting and updated regularly so your human readers and the search engine spiders will come back. The easiest way to ensure that your site gets new content is to have an area on your site for a blog or news section. Then get members of your organization including the CEO to post new and interesting articles.

8 - Use Social Media

A blog is just one element of social media there are others such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. You should utilize these social media platforms to link to appropriate areas of your website.

9 - Share the Love

An easy way to get back links to your website is to link out to other websites in your niche and establish link partners. Create an article about a particular product or service and exchange it with your link partner, posting their article on your website.

10 - Benchmark and Monitor Your Progress

You will not know if your efforts are paying off unless you monitor your progress. Install Google Analytics and also consider using a third party application such as Master Website Manager.