SEO Tips To Increase Website Search RankingsIt’s been a while since we’ve covered a few search ranking factors for boosting one’s website search results across major search engines.

Well, today, we’re going to address the top 20 SEO tips that website owners can implement and execute to ensure that their website’s search rankings remain highly visible or boost your way into page one search rankings across major search engines.

Here are my top 20 SEO tips for small businesses to boost their website’s search rankings.

1. Include a regularly updated blog with high-quality content.

Including a blog as a part of your website’s business strategy is only scratching the surface in regard to SEO and boosting your website search rankings. More importantly, you want an up-to-date blog that aims to inform, educate and engage potential and existing customers. Search engines love blogs containing high-quality content that is organically linked and shared throughout the Internet by real people. Including a blog with a sound and consistent content marketing strategy will provide your website with an SEO advantage over competitors without blogs.

2. Include social media interactive buttons.

One of the main ways to generate greater buzz, more traffic, and greater search ranking visibility is to add interactive social media buttons to your website pages or blog posts. If you’re using a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, there are available plugins, both paid and non-paid, that will allow you to make your website pages and blog posts easily shared popular social media networking sites such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter to name a few.

3. Include web analytics to measure SEO effectiveness.

One of the main things that most small business owners forget to do when they venture into SEO is to measure their website’s progress and overall SEO effectiveness. Tools such as Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics are free tools that supply key performance indicators for how well your website and its SEO are performing over time. Google is not the only provider of website analytics, as there are a number of free SEO tools and paid web and SEO analytics software.

4. Streamline and optimize website codebase.

Search engine spiders and crawlers are always on the lookout for troublesome and buggy websites with erroneous codebases. Websites containing a large number of code errors and outdated tactics and techniques are known to take a severe beating when it comes to being highly visible and ranking on page one of search engines. Search engines label inefficient websites as sites of poor user experience and are less likely to rank such websites high in search results. In short, keep your codebase simple, clean, and speedy.  One way to do this is to use CMS-specific web hosting plans like those offered at GoDaddy or  InMotion Hosting: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

5. Unique content is the only way to stay on top.

If you’re paying $2 per article and simply posting without fine-tuning, editing, or re-writing the article in its entirety, then chances are high that your website and its ranking will soon be tanked by search engines. Search engines are not looking for the next copycats or large amounts of pirated content. It’s quite the opposite. Search engines are looking for authentic authorship with uniquely written content that is shared throughout the Internet by real humans. Content marketing is not a pump-and-dump until you get to page one of the search results. Sound content marketing requires uniqueness, thoroughness, timeliness, and consistency to deliver high-quality content that solves a customer’s problem in an engaging manner.

6. Apply meta tags with the exception of the keyword meta tag.

Once upon a time, many SEO algorithms and light years ago, a small business owner could apply an all-you-can-eat type SEO approach to their website by adding meta tags throughout the entire website. These meta tags, title, description, and keyword tags, would be chocked full of keywords as far as the east sets from the west. But those days of keyword stuffing, including using your competitor’s company name in meta tags, are long gone. The title and description meta tags exist and highly contribute to SEO ranking factors, but the keyword meta tag has seen better days and should be retired by all attempting to use it throughout their website.

7. Get rid of duplicate content sections aimed solely at search engines.

Many times, a small business website may contain sitewide blocks of content, either in the header or footer, or both, to rank their website for a set of keywords. The thought of including duplicate content blocks in the header or footer is an old trick to rank sites that died many moons ago. It no longer works, so remove the keyword-laden content before your website is severely penalized or de-indexed.

8. Limit the number of footer links.

And for those small business owners that think effective link building is adding a multitude of keyword-laced links to the footer will stealthily boost your website to page one rankings across major search engines. Think again. Just link keyword-laden content. Adding gobs of links in your footer or header is only an SEO recipe for disastrous and costly consequences. Having a few links is okay, but having a trove of cities, zip codes, keywords, or whatever the hottest linking fad it will lead you to definite SEO failure.

9. Structure and organize website architecture.

So many small business owners perform their own SEO with a half-understood mentality of the do-it-yourself SEO practices they are implementing and executing. Most tend to load up their home page with irrelevant content, irrelevant linking schemes, and a wide range of keywords to the point of confusing search engines. Be sure to structure and organize your website architecture to allow your content, keyword focus, and internal and external linking to have a parent-child or pole-tent relationship. Architecting your website to have a parent-child or pole-tent relationship in regards to link building, keyword focus, and overall content marketing strategy will increase SEO effectiveness and the probability that your website ranks on page one across major search engines.

10. Apply variations of keywords throughout every website page.

There are over 200+ SEO ranking factors to consider when optimizing one’s website to rank highly in search results. As much talk as there is in regards to focused head and long tail keywords, the real benefit to boosting search ranking is how well you’re able to use variations of keywords throughout every page of your website. From page titles and descriptions to the use of alt tags on images and header tags to better organize one’s content, there is a multitude of opportunities to optimize one’s website for higher search rankings seamlessly.

11. Secure your website using .htaccess or web.config files.

One of the best ways to boost your SEO effectiveness is ensuring that your website is secure, limiting every possible opportunity for hackers to take your website down, infect your website with malicious malware and spyware, or steal your customer’s sensitive information. Depending upon your web host provider and web hosting plan, I suggest using the .htaccess or web.config to limit hackers and thieves of images and bandwidth yet increase overall website speed and loading performance. Using such files in the long term will keep you from having sleepless nights worrying about your website being the next big site hit by hackers.

12. Optimize all aspects of your images.

Most small business owners just add images to their websites and miss out on one of the greatest opportunities to increase SEO effectiveness and their website’s search rankings. Be sure to include keywords and variations of keywords in image filenames, title text, alt text, descriptions, and captions for images. As for the format, it’s best to optimize your image size for KB and nothing higher and use common file formats of .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, or .png.

13. Minify your external documents to increase website speed and load time.

Minification is the procedure of eliminating unneeded natures (such as spaces, tabs, and source code notes) from the basic code to decrease its folder size. The perfect files to minify are CSS and Javascript files that are rarely seen when website pages are loaded. To the naked eye or unassuming user, a page loads fine; however, using tools like Pingdom can help you identify external files that are taking their little sweet time to load and costing you greatly by lowering your search rankings due to their laziness in loading.

14. Consolidate JavaScript & CSS to one file each.

Limit the number of web requests it takes for potential and existing customers to load your website by consolidating javascript and CSS into one file each. Yes, it may make perfect sense to have independent files for coding and organization purposes, but doing so can place entirely too much overhead and too many web request requirements on a website. Too many web requests definitely tax a server when multiplying the number of requests and users, degrading website performance in all aspects and lowering search ranking.

15. Apply CSS sprites to decrease web requests.

Another option for decreasing the number of web requests and saving on bandwidth is using CSS sprites for images. A CSS Sprite is a joint of slighter images keen on one large image, or said in a simpler manner, using one image instead of multiple images. Essentially, you can have all images as one big optimize image and use the CSS background-position to display the appropriate image.

16. Stay far away from client-side code and choose server-side code.

When and where applicable, choose to implement server-side code over client-side code. Client-side coding can be highly unpredictable, less secure, and adds a substantial amount of overhead to the user experience, slowing it considerably, and bi-communication channels back to the web server as opposed to server-side coding practices.

17. Avoid inline CSS & JavaScript.

Inline CSS and Javascript are old techniques no longer used by websites seeking higher search ranking visibility. With the latest release of CSS3 and HTML5, there is less of a need for inline coding for websites. Avoiding inline CSS and Javascript will not only keep code clean and easy to search for spiders and crawlers, but they will also decrease the file size and increase the speed and performance of loading each page. In turn, this increases the probability that the website will be favored for higher search rankings.

18. Using content network and web services to load various external files.

Again, a good bit of SEO revolves around speed, performance, and the ability of a website to provide the fastest, most effective, and most efficient user experience that can possibly be achieved. Loading many or all of your website assets & features to 3rd party content networks and web services, such as jQuery, Google, and Amazon, to name a few, really decreases the effort it takes your web server to load pages and increases chances for greater spider and crawler responsiveness when crawling and indexing your website.

19. Aim for a responsive and effective cross-browser experience.

Mobile is taking the SEO world by storm, and if your website is not mobile-friendly, you are falling behind and putting your website in grave danger of being considered and labeled as outdated. From mobile to tablet to desktop and laptop, the baseline for any website of today is to be responsive. Not only responsive in design but responsive in content based on the device in hand. Gone are the days are creating two separate websites for mobile and desktop. These two worlds are now one in design, and they are doing the same on the SEO front.

20. Use a reliable, reputable web hosting service.

There is nothing that can damage your website and its SEO ranking than using an unreliable, disreputable web hosting provider and service. Invest the money to have your website hosted with a reputable provider, such as A2 Hosting, InMotion Hosting, and GoDaddy, that can keep your website up around the clock and without incident and major downtime. Unresponsive websites, both in performance and design, severely limit the chance for increased search rankings and SEO effectiveness. Be sure to pay very close attention to your monthly storage and bandwidth usage, as reaching the limit on either can degrade web services and cause a less-than-desirable user experience for customers, spiders, crawlers, and search engines altogether. Personally, I recommend using a VPS web hosting plan or WordPress hosting.

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Written by Alvin Brown
He's an experienced and passionate serial entrepreneur, founder and publisher of Kickstart Commerce. Alvin possesses a great love for startups dominating their market using profitable digital strategies for greater commerce.