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Get Found Online: 3 Ways To Improve Your SEO Ranking

June 30, 2009

Today's blog is brought to you by Moeed Saeed, project manager with my client Total Attorneys where he leads development of their High Performance Marketing solution for lawyers in solo practice or small law firms.

Regardless of what your business you are in, chances are potential clients are using the Web to find what you are selling.  As a business owner, you should be spending little or no money on Yellow Page ads and more on Web marketing.  That’s where your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy comes in.

As most of tech-savvy entrepreneurs know, your SEO strategy should be designed to boost your ranking on Google (and maybe other search engines), so that you are more visible to your customers. The closer to the top of the search results that your Web site appears, the more likely customers are to find and click on your listing. 

Simply speaking, the more clicks you get on your site, the more customers you will call you.  So, how do you increase your SEO rank? The latest SEO research shows that there are a few simple things that business owners can do that will yield increased Google rankings.  Best of all, these tips will not cost you anything to get off the ground:

1.    Start a blog that links to your Web site.  Create one on Blogspot or Wordpress, and blog about real topics that would interest a real audience. Next, setup links from your blog to your Web site.   Ideally, your blog should be related to your industry so readers will be compelled to actually click on the hyper-links.  Google indexes blogs and promotes Web sites that are linked from blogs, thereby increasing your page rank.

2.    Move your keywords near the top of your post.  Words that appear near the top of your page are given more SEO value than words that are near the bottom.  Therefore, figure out what keywords your customers use to search for you and your competitors, and make those appear in your first paragraph.

3.    Insert images on your site and tag them with keywords.  Techies call these image tags “alt tags.” They are relatively easy to do and will promote your site.  The images should, of course, be related to your post.

These three tactics are not an exhaustive list, so keep your expectations realistic.  Implementing these tips may not get you on the first page of Google but, more likely than not, you can out rank your competitors. 

However, if you progress your SEO efforts long-term, you can truly achieve the coveted first page ranking in Google.  Then you can focus more on satisfying your clients and less on getting them in the door.

Editor's Note: My thanks to Moeed for this timely article! I hope you'll share your comments and questions for him here.

Posted by Sima Dahl on June 30, 2009 | Comments (4)