I’m often asked by clients how to improve their search engine rankings and here are a collection of things that while I can’t guarantee they’ll miraculously improve your search ranking overnight – they are free and they can’t hurt.
1) Add more content! Also ensure that articles you write are laid out with keyword rich titles and subtitles & all images have descriptive “alt” tags. And check things like the page titles & descriptions by looking in the Page Source for your browser.
Yes the search rankings will improve as you add more content – but you also definitely need to be sharing it on places like Facebook and other sites.
The more links out there that Google can find to your site the better.
2) Find other directory sites who will put links to your site on their site (often reciprocally). Get as many people as you know to put links to the site on their websites (the more authoritative, the better weighting they have – e.g. www.bbc.co.uk would be very high ranking! Better still if they are in your area of expertise) If you have an event, be sure to list it with any local event listing guides /What’s on sites)
3) Sign up for a Twitter account and start following some other people who do the same sort of things as you do, see who they’re following. Start tweeting some interesting stuff – re-tweet interesting articles and links to articles on your site (what do you mean, you haven’t got any articles on your site? – write something! See [1])
Get your developers to add your twitter feed to your site so people can see you’re active in the Twitter community and they can follow you
4) Set up a Google+ account – you can just create a brief Profile page – and most importantly put a pic of yourself ( a head shot pref) as your profile image. We can then link the profile page up with the site so you should be able to see your little face next to the site when you Google for it e.g.
In theory it should mean more people click on your link when they see your lovely face! (Note: You’ll need to get your developer to add the link to G+)
5) Set up a Facebook page – its a great way of getting a community of followers together and sharing interesting articles (beware though it gets addictive & FB are always changing how the rules work as to who’s news feed you appear on so I wouldn’t rely on it as the sole means of marketing)
6) Set up a Pinterest account and start pinning the best images from your site.
7) Set up a Google Places account which will allow your business address to appear on maps – although whether you want your address to be pinpointed on a map remains to be seen – its good for local searches though.
8) Put the link to your site in the signature footer of all your emails (most email software has a way of automatically adding signatures)
9) Writing other articles for your site or blog – anything that can be shared and that makes you seem like an authority in your field is a good idea. Doesn’t have to be long, but its all good content for the search engines.
10) Submit your site to the following sites to be crawled
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url (or http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster?FORM=HDRSC7)
As well as ensuring you have a Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools account – obviously
11) Ensure you have an xml sitemap and that’s been submitted to Google & Bing
[More points to be added as I think of them!]
Considerations
Bear in mind though that social media does require a bit of ongoing maintenance – at least a weekly (or at very least monthly) post on each should be enough to convince people you’re worth following / sharing. You can use tools like Hootsuite or Buffer App to schedule tweets & posts to be published so its not obvious you’re doing all your tweeting at Sunday night! You can use these tools to spread out your interesting thoughts throughout the week
Search Engine Optimisation is a bit of a dark art and no-one has all teh answers (no matter what they tell you)
But the main focus of your attention should always be writing good, clear, engaging content so that when people eventually do find your site they will want to stay a while.
Other reading:
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
If you have plenty of time to devote to this subject then the next logical step would be to see what keywords your competitors are using, and possibly thinking about using Adwords or other online advertising, but that’s where I defer to the real SEO specialists!