nowadays, a typical research mission starts at a search engine. thanksgiving recipes? google. can’t find what i need on google? switch to yahoo. need more specific information about something i found on yahoo? wikipedia. it’s great, as a consumer, to have millions of results show up every time we search for something on the internet. but this isn’t great news for businesses whose sites aren’t optimized for organic search. this means that your website, even if it has the best thanksgiving recipes known to man, will never be seen by a potential customer.

the days when businesses had to focus only on their brand and services are long gone. now businesses have to focus on how consumers will find their company on the internet as well as building their brand. in the world of search engines, seo (short for search engine optimization) is king. seo is the process of improving your site’s ranking on the major search properties. in other words does a relevant keyword bring up your website and on what page? why is good seo important? put simply, because 62% of search users only click a link on the first page of search results.

here are some quick tips to improve your seo:

1. keywords, keywords, keywords
choosing the right words is crucial to getting noticed on large search engines. please describe your business and services or products in a concise sentence or two, and use those keywords. you will also need to refine your html or css tags and make sure that your web content is contains frequent keywords. go here to learn more about keyword selection.

2. a high performance loading time improves your ranking
the faster your website loads, the better. for some businesses, that might mean ditching HTML code for a more efficient CSS code. go check your website’s loading time here.

3. linkbaiting
this is one of the most interesting techniques for improving rankings on large search engines, and also the most controversial. there are different ways to ‘linkbait’. a website could include some interesting content which may generate enough interest for others to link back to, thus boosting traffic. you can also link to articles, applications, content, or use websites such as digg.com to generate interest.  for information on linkbaiting “rules”  go here.

let us know what other quick seo tips you have.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 6:25 pm and is filed under blog.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.