Here’s a good way to tell the economy is (finally) rebounding: more and more people are calling us wanting to get their websites ranked better on search engines. Regardless of your marketing budget, not having a strong presence on search engines is no longer an option.

When your website doesn’t rank well, not only is it your loss, but to make matters worse it’s your competitor’s gain. If you’re not ranking well it’s probably because of some fairly basic things that you’re not doing, and the good news is that once you start doing them you can see major progress in a pretty short amount of time.

The fact that we’re getting an influx of requests for SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is encouraging for two reasons:

For one, we worked hard when we re-designed our website to be make it more SEO-friendly and the reason we’re getting so many incoming calls is due in part to it ranking better. This proves to us that we’re doing to our website, as well as our clients’ websites, is working.

Secondly, business owners are realizing that the ROI model for SEO is so powerful that they need to re-structure their marketing budgets accordingly.

The bottom line is that as more and more people use Google and other search engines to find your products or services, the more important it is that your website is listed there for them to visit.

This post will discuss some of the most neglected SEO-based techniques we often see with new customers. Our strategy for SEO and internet marketing in general is two-fold; the first priority is driving potential customers to your website, the second is the experience they have when they get there. 

The latter, which is generally referred to as the User Experience, or UX, will be covered in a separate post, for now we’re going to focus on leveraging SEO to get more traffic to your website.    

1. Take your tags to the cleaners

Used to be all you had to was put some basic keywords into the tags, or the specific areas in your website’s code that describe its relevant content, and the site would rank well on search engines.

Times have changed and as the value of top SEO rankings has increased so has the competition to get there. Some tags are more important than others and they need to be consistently updated as search trends change.

Today, your customers may search for your services using one set of keywords, but in six months they may look for something different. That’s why it’s important to perform keyword research on a regular basis to make sure your site is optimized for most highly-searched terms.

If you rank #1 for a keyword that gets 50 searches a month, but then rank #30 on a term that gets over 1,000, you’re basically sending your customer right to your competitor’s doorstep. On a new SEO project one of the first things we do is evaluate the tags on a website. It’s important not to overlook them as they play a huge role in getting, and keeping, your website ranked.

2. It’s time to get your link on

Search engines have evolved to a point to where the factors and formulas they use to rank a website on a results page would make an engineer at NASA curl up in the fetal position.

At the end of the day, all these equations and algorithms are trying to answer one question: “How relevant is any given website to the keywords just entered by the user?” Relevance is a big word in SEO and it’s one of the most critical components to getting a site to rank well.

That’s one of the first questions we ask new customers, “How relevant do you think your website is to a search engine?”.

If you don’t think your website does a good job stating how important your business is to someone that is looking to use your services or buy your product, chances are a search engine won’t either.

So how do you make your website more relevant in the eyes of a search engine? Have other websites, especially websites that are related (related, relevant, get it?), link back to you. If a search engine reviews your site and finds that other websites think it’s worthwhile enough to link to, then they’ll usually rank it higher than a website that doesn’t have those links.

The good news is basic link building is easy, just pick up the phone or fire off some emails to your clients, partners, friends, family, whoever that can put a link on their website back to yours. As a plus, having links point from your site to other sites is appealing to search engines too. 

Long story short: One of the quickest ways to give your website’s rankings a shot in the arm is to get some good inbound links.

3. Freshen up your content

An analogy I like to use is to compare your website to a video store. If the video store had the exact same movies to rent every single time you went, what would you do? Probably go to another video store. Well, that’s what a search will do if your website always has the exact same old content on it.

This one kind of ties back to relevancy, a search engine just won’t look at your website as a valuable, informative resource if the same material is on it for months and months. And keeping it updated is easy, just post a few news updates every month as a starting point.

Some of the more advanced work we do on our clients’ websites (as well as our own) is integrate social media such as Facebook wall posts and twitter feeds. As a plus, search engines hold these networks in high regard so having them link directly to your website is a good idea.

4. Stay on top of it

All of these techniques have been proven to be effective in raising the visibility of a website on search engines but their full benefit can’t be realized without consistent management. Now this doesn’t mean it’s a full time job, but some pro-active maintenance can do a world of good.

Things change when it comes to search engines and staying on top of those changes is important. We already discussed the value of making sure your keywords are regularly updated to reflect search trends, but the organization of the website can’t be overlooked.

As your company changes make sure you put in a little time to change your website with it. If there’s contradictory information out there about your company it can cause a search engine to unnecessarily penalize your website and rank it lower.

By staying on top of your site and making it a priority you can ensure you keep it ranked.

5. Put yourself on the map

Local Search results have become a huge benefit for local businesses (or national businesses with local branches) and unlike other forms of organic SEO, it’s absolutely free and something any business can take advantage of.

One of the most frequent statements we hear in our meetings is “How do I get listed on the map?” What this refers to is the graphical map that search engines use to display businesses in any given geographic area that is searched. The position of the map is such that it’s displayed very prominently on the search results page, thereby providing a ton of value for any business listed on it.

It also shows the phone number of the business along with a link to the website. Because the local search and map graphic has become such a powerful tool for getting leads to a website we’ve developed a comprehensive guide that shows a step-by-step process to make the most of a listing on it and we provide it free of charge for anyone that asks.

Get serious about getting ranked

Hopefully this post has helped clarified some of the key pieces of the puzzle in regards to SEO and internet marketing in general. When you add it all up, there’s a little bit of art and a little bit of science to getting a website to rank consistently well on search engines. We work hard to learn both and when you get right down to it if you put together a good plan, execute it well and make sure to keep up with it your website will see major improvement.

If you’d like to learn more about our custom SEO packages, or you have questions in general about internet marketing, let us know and or leave your questions in the comments section below.