SEO (search engine optimization) is important these days to help your site do better in searches on sites like Google and Yahoo, among others. The better your site does naturally in Google searches, the less you have to pay in advertising costs. However hiring SEO specialists to do the work for you can also be expensive. This just depends on how much competition you’ve got.
Here are some tips and information so you can do some of the work yourself (or at least ask your webmaster to implement these things), save yourself some money and hopefully help your site’s ratings with Google. Note that there are no guarantees that you’ll end up on the first page of search results, but your site will do better than if you don’t do these things.
Inbound Links
I briefly touched on this in an earlier post, but I can’t stress this enough: the more oneway, inbound links pointing to your site, the more Google thinks your site must be significant in your field. You want to avoid just setting up reciprocal links with other sites. Google just sees this as sites working together to try an manipulate the system. List your site with directory sites. This isn’t the strongest source, but it’s a place to start. You want to try and get sites that are related to your industry link to you. The strongest sites are Educational (.edu) or Government (.gov) sites. Site’s with those extensions are very valuable – mostly because they are hard to get. Maybe you know someone who has access to adding links to a college or school website. That would be a great resource. Anyway, I can’t stress this enough: oneway, inbound links are one of the most important thing you can do to improve your sites rankings.
I’ll be adding more tips soon. Be sure to check back often.