Image credit: Google is a giant robot

Even as someone who lives and breathes marketing, instead of oxygen like most human organisms, I find the somewhat-black art of SEO a little intimidating. So I thought I’d provide some simple SEO tips that I’ve personally used, and will help you optimize your content over 95% of the other stuff out there.

The trick is focusing on the ‘O’ part – Optimization. SEO isn’t about fixing anything you’re doing wrong; it’s about making your great content even better, so it more likely to be found by customers searching for it. imagine your content as a gorgeous debutante about to be introduced to society at the ball. SEO is the sparkly tiara that attracts the attention of all those handsome search engine suitors. There’s a working metaphor in there somewhere, I swear.

Let’s skip the ado, and get on with it – what are the basic SEO tricks that any small businesss can easily implement without messing around with any godforsaken code?

Write great content

The funny thing about SEO is that it’s sort of, well… cheating – basically, you’re gaming Google’s and other search engines’ scoring methods to have your content appear higher in the results listings. The catch is that the engines are constantly adjusting their algorithm, and without constant testing and reverse-engineering, you can’t be guaranteed to hold a particular spot.

So what’s the point? Well, Google and others have openly stated that they’re always searching for good content, and as the engines get smarter, SEO will become less important compared to the overall quality. Translation: stuffing your posts full of keywords is no substitute for having something meaningful to say. A great example of this trend is the recent launch of Gmail’s Priority Inbox feature, that measures the amount you engage with messages from a certain sender, in order to decide whether it’s important – expect that technology to expand to general search if it catches on. Remember, people may arrive at your site thanks to SEO, but they’ll stay longer and link to the good stuff if you provide it.

Pick smart keywords

Keywords are the phrases for which you want your content to be found. By choosing wisely, you can pre-qualify your visitors to make sure they’re interested in what you have to offer before they arrive. If you’re an italian restaurant, it just makes sense to have the words “Italian Restaurant” sprinkled throughout your website, capice?

Others may be using the same keywords as you, however, and therefore compete with your website for customers’ attention. This is where carefully choosing your keywords comes in. Consider exactly what words customers are using to find you. Instead of “Italian Restaurant”, they may be looking for “Pizzeria”, or “best Mussels Fra Diavolo”, or “moist, creamy Tiramisu” (I should stop right there – *drool*).

Focusing on these keywords in addition to those your competitors use may give you a nudge ahead of them. One of the best ways to figure out which words to optimize for is to use an analytics package (I’m partial to Google Analytics, myself) and track which keywords customers are already using to find you. You can then either concentrate on sprinkling the best-performing keywords throughout your site, or throw them into a tool like Google’s Insights for Search to see what related keywords could drive extra traffic for you. Once you have your keywords, work them into your content – especially…

Your headlines – pay attention to them

Search engines take special note of the headlines on each page, as they should be a strong indicator of the type of information they contain – this means you should have your chosen keywords included in there. Subheads are also important, since they denote what a particular paragraph or section may pertain to.

Make connections with reciprocal links

Linking to relevant information helps to establish you as a trusted and relevant resource of information on whatever subject you’re covering, so by all means link to your source material – even better: if you actually hyperlink your chosen keywords, this shows the search engines that your site not only contains relevant information, but can act as a funnel to even more.

The same goes for linking back to your website from your various social media outposts as well – all of these reciprocal links help build your website as a legitimate online presence, and trusted authority in the eyes of Google, which will only help push you up the rankings.

Give sight to the blind

Search engines are like moles, in that they’re blind, they live in the dark, and occasionally win millions of dollars on reality TV shows aaand that’s about it. Images and other types of media are a particular blind spot, meaning that they cannot process the actual content of these elements, and instead rely on the context within which they’re used in order to deduce what’s inside them. To help them out, you should make sure to include your keywords within the title/alt attributes of your images – the little yellow box of text that appears when you hover over an image – and optionally in the actual filename of the image, too.

Most website content management systems (CMS’s) such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc., give you the ability to add in these attributes when inserting an image, so take advantage of it. If you’re not using a CMS, well it’s only a tiny bit of code to add titles and alt-attributes – God won’t forsake you that much.

There must be tons of other things that non-coders can do to improve their SEO – tell me what I missed in the comments, dammit!

Tags: analytics, Bing, Google, how to, search, search engines, small business, The Basics, tips