Simple SEO Tips & Tricks

At the center of every business's online marketing strategy is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Mastering the art of SEO is no simple task. Although SEO may appear to be a daunting challenge, consider the follow simple yet effective methods to help jumpstart your SEO campaign.

1. Keywords! You should be conscious of placing relevant keywords across every page of your website. Keywords are essentially the words someone uses to stumble across a website via a search engine (like Google, Yahoo!, MSN). Therefore, its in your best interest to include as many appropriate ones as possible! There are many great online tools to help with keyword research and analysis. Our favorites are Google AdWords and SEMRush.
2. Create a sitemap. Creating sitemaps-a page listing and linking to all other parts of your website makes your website more visible to spiders, which in turn will improve your sites ranking.
3. Create search-friendly URLs. To do this, include clear and relevant keywords in the URL. For example, instead of www.shampooproducts.com/347658/s202.htm, try using www.shampooproducts.com/conditioner/dove. Notice how the latter URL incorporates keywords such as conditioner and Dove, while the former URL simply utilizes the generic business classification system. Search engines will rank URLs like the latter higher than those like the former.
4. Use Flash sparingly. Although flash may look pretty, flash images do not allow you to link to a single page. In addition, Flash is definitely on the way out with many companies choosing to go different directions for their web design.
5. Fresh content. Your content needs to be updated regularly if you wish to increase traffic to your site. A fun and effective way to do this is integrating a blog! Blogs allow you to reach out to clients and customers, provide more opportunities to link internally and externally, and give your site a personality of sorts. Also, in order to "beat" the Google Panda update, presenting fresh content is essential so that Google doesn't treat your content as spam and punish you for it.

Although the above tips are by no means comprehensive, they should suffice in allowing you to begin your journey to mastering SEO. Good luck, and let us know if you have any questions!