So you already have a beautiful website or online store to show off your products or services. You are probably asking yourself, what is the next step? How is anyone going to find my site? With literally millions of websites all trying to get noticed on search engines such as Google it really is survival of the fittest.

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, can be quite a dark art but by implementing our handy hints you stand a greater chance of getting the right exposure, the right traffic and more sales.

Get your business moving with these crucial tips to increase traffic to your site or store.

Be a Tag Dag

Think of your site like a road map that search engines are using to find a destination. Your destination is your product or service so without your destination being included in your site then you can’t expect Google or the other key sites to find out what you do. A couple of simple tips are to make sure every image on your site is suitably named and relevant meta tags are added to your site like beacons to ensure you are indexed

Content is King

Gone are the days when sites could just have pages and pages of content with sneaky keywords repeated throughout the text to trick the search engines into thinking the site was relevant. Be smart with your content and nowadays less is more. Keep your content relevant and to the point but don’t try to trick Google, Bing or the other main engines.

A Change is as Good as a Rest

It will come as no surprise that news sites like BBC and CNN are always at the top of Google. Their prominent position isn’t just because they are household names; it is more due to the fact that news stories are always changing so the site is constantly evolving. Search engines love fresh content so keep your site up to date and relevant to your target demographic.

Get Linking

Search engines serve a simple purpose that is to display the most appropriate search results based on what the user is looking for. One of the main ways they rank a site and its content is to test its popularity. If a particular site or page has many other sites linking to it then search engines will assume that its content is ranked higher and more material to the user than other similar pages from other websites.

Put your Writing Hat on

You want your site to be noticed you also want credibility and ultimately you want traffic and sales. One of the best ways to quickly get traffic and increase rank on search engines is to be a great writer. Try your hand at writing an original article on a topic that is relevant to your business and then simply submit this to one of the many PR sites. It won’t take long for the article to start spreading around the worldwide web and subsequently your site should see a whole host of new visitors.

Having a site that can perform well with any search engine is not something that happens overnight. It takes a lot of practice, hard work and persistence. There are many resources available online to assist with SEO but there is no quick route to a number one Google ranking so remember that it is a marathon and not a sprint.

Ezine by Ruth Mcilroy

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