Follow these 7 tips to boost your efforts in a hurry. And when you find a little more time, mosey on back here for some more search engine optimization tricks.

1. Content is a huge influencing factor of your ranking score. Focus on creating strong, useful content and make sure to update the content often.
2. Links are the next important layer of a fully baked site. Build strong networks of backlinks and also link to thought leaders in your niche.
3. Use keywords and phrases (without spamming or stuffing the page) in titles, descriptions, text links and the domain name.
4. Optimize videos and images with strategic file names, ALT attributes, and and titles. It’ll help the content to show up blended search results and will also help the overall impact of your SEO efforts.
5. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

If you’re looking into giving your domain a face lift, here are 5 key elements that will please prospects and search engines alike.

1. An attractive design – Visiting a cluttered or visually unappealing site can be immediately offputting. Whether the page looks extremely outdated or has so many unorganized elements that it’s an eye sore, a bad first impression can drive a heck of a lot of traffic away. When outlining a plan for a new design, less is more. A clean, sparkling page with aesthetic zest goes a long way.
2. Powerful Content – A good deal of thought and care should go into creating fresh content. Language should be concise, informative and easy to understand. Websites coded in high level lingo, acronyms or technical speak will only appeal to a small group of visitors. The rest will click the back button with a heavy sigh of frustration. On the other hand, websites flooded with sales pitches or shallow content will be about as effective as an empty pool. Important questions to ask while writing include: Who is my audience? What can I talk about that my competitors cannot? How can I establish my business as a thought leader?
3. Friendly User Interface – All site visitors should be able to quickly and easily navigate to every corner of a domain. Companies should additionally include updated company contact information. A phone number, address, email, and contact form are essential in assuring that interested prospects are able to inquire about services or ask questions.
4. A Sitemap – The sitemap should be located at the root of the website where search engines can easily access it and utilize it almost as an index. Website owners should submit their sitemap to search engines.
5. SEO – Website optimization includes many elements (and will most likely call for a whole different blog on key SEO elements for a successful website redesign) that can substantially boost the power of its site. Important features include strong titles and headings, strategic keywords, optimized title tags and RSS Feeds. Websites should never, ever cheat or utilize “black hat marketing” techniques. Search engines are way too smart to be tricked and will heavily punish websites dabbling in dishonest strategies.

What important elements do you consider when redesigning your website?

Read more website redesign key elements.

Keywords are a critical component of SEO because they are the words that define you. In order to assure that your company is visible to prospects and customers, it’s important to utilize all of the possible words and phrases that consumers  might use for Google searches. Unsure of what keywords might work best for you? Here are a few tools to get you started:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Simply type in the subject you’re researching and Google’s keyword tool will suggest keywords and the monthly and annual search volumes for those terms. If you’re running a Pay Per Click campaign, this tool can also provide you with the cost per click.
• Overture (Yahoo!) Keyword Tool – Yahoo’s keyword tool will also help you to predict the amount of traffic certain keywords will bring and lists monthly regional search volumes for the most popular search engines based on Overture search counts for different geographic markets. It also provides links to price estimate tools for Google Adwords.
• Google Rankings Tool – If you’re curious about the strategy of your competitors, use the Google Rankings Tool to check how they rank with certain keywords. You can also use this tool to check your own SEO efforts.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Google algorithm is always changing. While metadata and pagerank might be important one day, both will be irrelevant the next. The one thing that Google will always value is helpful and well written content. Choose your keywords wisely, work on solid inbound and outbound links, and focus on quality content.

Any questions?

Social bookmarks: Every great piece of content that you write should be shared. Sites such as digg, delicious, stumbleupon and even Twitter can help your articles to receive a lot of attention and maybe even go viral. These bookmarks provide link juice, traffic to your site and major credit to search engine.

Links: Search engines view links as referrals. If someone’s linking to you, that means they value your site and find your content to be worthwhile. Therefore, the more people that recommend you, the more comfortable search engines feel recommending you also. On a similar note, by adding helpful links to your own content, you’re showing search engines that you care about providing useful information to your readers and that your site is worth visiting. And by linking to others, they might be flattered and feel inclined to link back to you, which is a huge SEO boost.

Tags and Categories: Behind every good piece of content is solid metadata and rich keywords. In addition to utilizing keywords in your anchor links, adding keywords as tags and categories will really punctuate the words you’ve selected to define you. To hone in on what keywords will benefit you the most, check out Google’s keyword tool.

Questions?

Today’s consumers no longer look to billboards and aisle scanning for inspiration on what product to purchase. Thanks to the internet, almost all business these days is conducted online. And while prospects search the internet for the the exact item they are looking for, thousands and maybe millions of businesses are vying for a top spot on the search results page. Evidence has shown that only 62% of search engine users click beyond the first page of results, so how does a company obtain a one of those coveted rankings? The answer is SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is a strategy used to optimize a website so that search engines will value the site’s content and rank that website higher.  Engines have “spiders” that crawl your URL on a regular basis to maintain relevant and updated information about your pages as well as evaluate your content. Here are some of the items these spiders are looking for:

• Link Juice – Links are a very powerful component of SEO for several reasons. External links that direct readers to helpful articles or relevant sites prove to search engines that the content is providing valuable information to visitors. At the same time, other websites that link to your page establish your expertise. Links are kind of like referrals. Every person or site that points to you is demonstrating your legitimacy and telling search engines that you are both respected and helpful.
• Keywords – The next important item on the SEO checklist is keywords. One crucial fact to consider is that spiders only index content and are not able to ‘read’ images or flash. Therefore, it’s up to your content to tell the story. Keywords provide a site map to search engines and guide them through the who, what, when, where and why of your company. The words that best describe your company and are most likely to be searched by prospects should be carefully selected and planted in the areas most visible to spiders. Headings, page titles, directories and indexes are all important areas for keyword utilization. Keywords should also be accented to draw maximum attention and demonstrate their importance. While bolding or italicizing might garner moderate attention, linking these words and phrases to  valued content will really distinguish them from the rest of the page.
• HTML – HTML is the backbone for your website and houses meta data, which is composed of titles, descriptions and keywords. While most SEO experts believe that meta data does not hold much power in the Google algorithm anymore, it still plays a role in Yahoo’s formula and the meta description is often the description used in the results page.

Links, keywords and HTML are just a few building blocks in the overall foundation of SEO practices. When planning your strategy, remember that search engines are extremely smart. Trying to trick them will get your site black listed and keep you on the back burner for years. The very best way to get ahead is to provide rich, well thought out content that is both relevant and helpful. Trying to cram a bunch of keywords into a page that doesn’t say very much will be very obvious to spiders. Like everything else in life, no tricks or shortcuts will ever be as fruitful as hard work and persistence.

That’s it for today! Come back next week for more SEO tutorials and deeper exploration of techniques and principles for Search Engine Optimization.