What can I do to improve my search engine rankings?

Search Engine Optimization is a complex and time consuming process. It is also fluid. The search engines are constantly tuning their systems to improve results. This can positively or negatively affect your rankings if you don't keep up on changes and adjust your strategies.

There are several factors that lead to increasing your website's ranking online and in return increasing your traffic. Below are a few things you can do to help improve your site's web presence.

On-Page
1. Appearance: Keep your site simple, easy to navigate, get rid of anything that does not add value. Compare your site to some of your competitors. Your website will be the first impression of your business for many people. If it doesn't look better than your competitors, you'll lose opportunities.

2. Traffic: For a novice, the easiest way to start getting traffic to your site is to just write good content. Think of your website as a book, with each page being a different chapter with different content. Write at least 200 or 300 words of text on each page. When a search engine crawls your website, it is trying to determine which keywords are most relevant for each one of your pages. For this reason it's important that you use industry specific keywords and phrases throughout your website to show search engines that you are knowledgeable in your field. Never ever copy/paste content from another source. You want original and personalized content.

3. Call to action. Decide what the #1 most important goal of your website is, and make it the easiest to find on the site. Remove any obstacles that make it hard for your customers to do business with you. If you are selling a product or service, make it easy to find the shopping page or add to cart button. Always have a simple way for your customers to contact you(phone, email address, or contact us form)

Off-Page

1. Not only do you want keywords within your website, but you also want other websites online linking back to you with those same keywords. Creating back links is similar to getting 'votes' for your site. The more votes you get, the more trusted your website is and thus the higher you will rank. Submitting your website to directories, article sites, blogs, forums, etc...are great ways to create links back to your website.

Social Media

1. A great way to increase traffic is to talk about your business in social networks. Websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube are all great avenues to help market your website to the public. Offer (appropriate) humor, how-to guides, polls, and promotions to get people to talk about your business and build an online community that you can engage with.

When you can tie all 3 of these together, you are setting yourself up for the best possible chance at ranking higher and increasing traffic.You will want to begin your SEO by making sure you are submitted to Search Engines. Search "submit my site to (search engine)" There are also hundreds of online directories that will accept submissions and add back links to your site.

Here are some 3rd party tools you can take advantage of as well. Keep in mind we can't offer support for these tools.

Google Webmaster Tools
http://www.google.com/webmasters

Google Adwords Keyword Planner
http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner

Check Back links & Anchor Text
www.bluebacklinks.com

Here is a getting started guide from Google
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

We offer professional SEO service if you decide that we can free you up to spend time on other aspects of your business.
Contact a Homestead representative for more information.