SEO for Dummies: Four quick tips to boost SEO

Co-written by Ashley Shafer and Stephanie Breneman

Whether it’s small or big business, increasing online visibility through search engine optimization (SEO) is key to a company’s growth and future success. SEO improves the visibility of a website by ranking high in search engine results (e.g. Google, Yahoo! or Bing). The earlier your company name shows up in search results, the more visitors and traffic your site will get.

How can you improve your SEO? Below are four quick tips:

  • Emphasize Keywords (search engines must find and “read” keywords on your website pages so they can properly classify or “index” your site)
    • Come up with several keywords that you think your customers are using when they search online and integrate these into pages of unique web content
    • Search for relevant keywords with Google AdWords ­­– a tool that gives the most common search terms related to a word or phrase that you provide
    • Have two to three individual keywords that appear in the first 100 to 200 words per page
  • Include Site Navigation
    • A sitemap tells search engines where every page is on your site, how it’s laid out and what pages have been updated
    • Add your navigation to the footer of the homepage
  • Update Your Website
    • Search engines reward sites that have relevant, frequently updated content
    • Publish keyword-rich original content
    • Integrate a blog into the website
  • Manage Your SEO!
    • Review your website traffic on a regular basis
    • Use Google Analytics to review the number of visitors to your page, length of time visitors are on pages, ranking of keywords, bounce rate, etc.