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Simple SEO Steps you can take to Improve your Website Today

As a website owner or business owner you’ve likely heard of search engine optimization before, but you probably have never signed up for SEO services with a firm or taken the time to make changes to your site that would help it rank higher in search results. Search engines are the new yellow pages, they’re the place that over 80% of consumers turn to before making a purchasing decision. That’s why it’s critical to have your business or website show up on the first page of results and ideally as close to the number 1 spot as possible.

If you’re in a competitive niche or a large market, you’re likely going to need to sign up for an SEO package to get your website on top, but if you’re in a small niche or small local market then there are a few things you can do yourself to try and get your website on page one of search results:

(1) Do some Spring Cleaning on your Website

If you’re slightly technically inclined, you can go into your website and make some small changes to the coding and content. When it comes to coding, you want to make sure you have optimized title tags, meta information, and anchor text. That means using your keywords that you want to rank for strategically in these locations to tell search engines what your website is all about.

On top of this, you also want to have quality, original content on your website. That means adding content when needed and making sure that you update this content regularly. The best way to add content is through regular blog posts on your website. This will help keep your site fresh, which search engines love, and it will help generate natural links to your website from 3rd party sites.

(2) Have a Properly Coded and Structured Website

So many small businesses hire a friend, neighbor, or kid down the block to build their website, and they end up with low quality websites that aren’t properly coded. This means websites that are made in flash, websites that are missing title tags, and websites that don’t convert well. Before you can market your website, make sure it is worth marketing and represents your business well. Your website is the first impression people will have, so make sure it’s a good one.

(3) Build some Inbound Links to your Website

Link building is a critical part of search engine optimization, so don’t be afraid to build some links on your own. You can do guest blog posts, submit articles, or try to get mentioned on a local news website. All these links will count as a vote for your website and tell search engines that your site is important and deserves to rank higher.

Again these three steps won’t rank a site in a highly competitive niche, but they certainly can rank a site in a small local market or less competitive niche. It’s a great place to start and if you find that you don’t have the time or expertise to rank your site on your own, there’s always companies out there who will take the online marketing burden off your shoulders.

This is a guest post by Brendan Egan, who is the owner of Simple SEO Group, an online marketing, web design, and SEO firm that helps small businesses improve their web presence. Brendan can be reached by visiting SimpleSEOGroup.com

Website Promotion Tools – When To Use Them?

I recently came across a blog promoting SEO Elite as one of the best SEO and Website Promotion Softwares out there. Having tried the software myself, I also agree that the software has great potential of getting you up in the Search Engine Rankings and Top positions and also to get traffic to your site.

Then I visited the official site for SEO Elite and read all what they had written on their main page:

“Learn how I use this revolutionary software to consistently average over 15,000 visitors to my websites, per day – Using only FREE search engines traffic from Google, Yahoo, and MSN!”

After reading over some of the material, I realised that these softwares are worthwhile if you already have a website with some useful content on it, or you have something which you can sell to your customers to be able to actually benefit or earn from the traffic that these tools drive to your site. Such tools and promotion softwares are no good for newbies, who do not have any established sites yet.

So my tip for all the newbies out there is to focus on making a website first. If you have a website, which you regularly update daily and have been doing so for a few months, then these softwares can be very helpful.

If your site is very new and has very few useful content on it, much of the traffic you drive to it using these softwares won’t be helpful. In fact, the visitors will come and visit your site and loose interest and might not come back again.

Free Web Directories

Heres a short list of free directories to start submitting your site to. I’ve started submitting my sites to directories and I’m looking for free directories only to submit to. So I’ve decided that I’ll be posting the directories I submit my links to here on a regular basis.

http://www.hugedirectory.net/
http://www.web-directory-submit.com/
http://www.directorynew.com/
http://www.lfaj.com/
http://www.pius.us/directory/
http://www.zopso.com/
http://www.d911.net/
http://www.linktomysite.net/
http://www.roqz.com/
http://www.plugxl.com/
http://www.ofcourse.us/

Most of these directories are very new and are offering free submissions for a limited time only, so hurry and add your link today!