Basic tips for search engine optimization

"SEO" means finding ways to increase your site's appearance in web visitors' search results. This generally means more traffic to your site.

While intense SEO can involve complex site restructuring with a firm (or consultant) that specializes in this area, there are a few simple steps you can take yourself to increase your search engine ranking.

All it requires is a little effort, and some re-thinking of how you approach content on your site.

Monitor where you stand

You won't know if your SEO efforts are working unless you monitor your search standings.You can keep an eye on your page rank with tools like Alexa and the Google toolbar.

It's also important to check your referrer log regularly to track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms they're using to find your site.

Keywords

You should be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Think about your keywords as search terms -- how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it?
The title tag and page header are the two most important spots to put keywords.

Link back to yourself

There is probably no more basic strategy for SEO than the integration of internal links into your site -- it is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages, SEO Consult says.

You should make it standard to link back to your archives frequently when creating new content. MarketingVox advises that you also make the anchor text search-engine-friendly: "The more relevant words point to a page, the more likely that page is to appear in search results when users run a query with those terms."

As with all other SEO approaches, be sure your links are appropriate, and be careful not to cross the line into excessive linking -- you don't want your visitors to get annoyed.

Create a sitemap

Adding a site map -- a page listing and linking to all the other major pages on your site -- makes it easier for spiders to search your site.

Avoid Flash

Flash might look pretty, but it does nothing for your SEO. According to the Search Engine Journal, "Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page... Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results."

Image descriptions

Spiders can only search text, not text in your images -- which is why you need to make the words associated with your images as descriptive as possible.

Start with your image names: adding an "ALT" tag allows you to include a keyword-rich description for every image on your site.

Content

Your content needs to be fresh -- updating regularly and often is crucial for increasing traffic.

Social media distribution

A CEO blog is just one element of social media distribution, an important SEO strategy according to SEO Consult. You should be distributing links to fresh content on your site across appropriate social networking platforms.

Whether displayed on your company's account, or recommended, re-tweeted, and re-distributed by someone else, this strategy exponentially muliplies the number of places where visitors will view your links.