SEO which is otherwise know as Search Engine Optimization, is the on & off page techniques you do to help convince the search engines that your site is the one they should list first in the search engines when someone does a specific search. 

Here is a list of important SEO tatics to start with …  and let me tell you there are many many more advanced tatics as well, but to keep this simple we will start with the basics and move on to more advanced later.

• Content - Is king .. yes you’ve heard this before but really it’s true.   Content is what feeds the search engines and helps make you the foremost authority on a topic or product.Not only is this a factor to keep people on the website but just as importantly  it is what the search engine reads to determine your ranking. Keep the content intriguing and relevant and broken out in short easy to read sections. Many readers scan but search engines eat up the text!
• Keywords — DO YOU RESEARCH or pay someone who knows what they are doing to do it. It will be the best money spent. You can have a site that is great  and targeting a horrible set of keywords and you will have wasted a lot
  of time and money. So make sure you do your keyword research identifying the long tail terms in your niche that are being underserved and those that can be monetized.One keyword tool is https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal which helps you look for popular keywords or phrases that you may not have  thought of.
• Add Alt tags to your Images - Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers. So use the alt tag at all times.
   
• Link Building - It is essential to have relevant inbound links to your website. The search engines see a link as a vote from one website to another and they are extremely important. Having many quality links with relevant anchor text (the text that you click on) will increase the authority that the search engines give your site.  When you hear the term authority site it refers to a site that has built up a reputation as a leader on that topic from both the users but more importantly from the search engines.  And getting inbound links from an authority site to yours is your goal since these inbound links are of higher value than say a less recongized and unrelated site. So all inbound links are not equal.
   
• Anchor Text - Anchor text is the text in a hyperlink that you actually click on. Using descriptive, keyword-rich link text can help your website rank better for those keywords. This applies both to links from other sites and your own
  websites linking structure. And for those that have been living under a rock please please instead of using ‘click here’ to point someone to another page on your site try to make the anchor text describe the page it is linking to. Be smart and don’t spam your site with internal links to try and build up your keyword rich links.
   
• Meta Title - These are descriptive tags at the top of an internet browser that says what the web page is about. These are extremely important because they are not only displayed to the user in the search engine results, but they are used to determine the content and relevance of your site in relation to certain keywords. It is really important to make the Meta Titles on your website individual to every single page with user friendly and key word rich  text.
   
• Meta Descriptions - The info in this section is not valued as high as the the title section by the search engines but this will be valuable to your users experience. The Meta Description is displayed as a snippet of text in the search results and will help to determine the website they eventually click on.
   
• Update Your Content Regularly - Everyone loves fresh original especially the Search engines! Update your site often as it will be visited by the Search  Engines more often and if your info is set up with RSS feeds users will come
  check out what you have read when they get notified of fresh content.
   
• Create a Site Map - To ensure all the pages on your website are indexed by the search engines use a sitemap to link directly to them. If you run a  large site some of your pages may be “buried” many levels deep.  Adding an HTML site map to the footer of your site will help the search engines  find them and you can sumit a xml site map to google which will help as well.

Every business should make sure their marketing budget designates funding to ongoing SEO efforts. On site SEO strategies like those listed above are a great place to start. There is a multitude of other efforts you can do to help increase
your traffic now that you have your site set up for the search engines properly.

Get an SEO Quote today for your business site.