Search engine optimization, also more commonly known as SEO, is one of the main marketing techniques to enhance your websites ranking in the search engines. Using your SEO tactics effectively and revising and adapting these tactics should show an apparent increase in your sites placement on the search engines.

You firstly want to begin about choosing your Keywords. This is a crucial decision and should not be taken lightly. The Google Analytics application is extremely useful in tracking, revising and adapting your sites rankings. This application enables you to see which key phrases result in the most conversion goals, which is obviously your main objective. The main bit of advice would be to stay away from popular, general keywords. Because these are extremely common, you will find that the competition to achieve a high ranking is very tough.

The ‘AdWords keyword suggestion’ tool is brilliant in assisting you in your choice. This will suggest niche key phrases that will have a high search volume, with low competition. Yes your site may not be as widely available with niche key phrases, but you’ll be targeting the right market that is more likely to actually purchase from your site.

Content is another crucial element when trying to increase your sites rankings. The content needs to be relevant, well written and have lots of it! This will, more than likely, appeal to the search engines in comparison to a great looking website, but that is just filled with videos/images etc. Other sites will be more inclined to link to your pages, if the content is good, therefore further increasing your search engine ranking. Updating your content regularly will help visitors go to your site as everyone likes fresh content. Therefore resulting in more visits to the site, equaling in more traffic going to your site. You need to also consider your site’s structure; having a simple navigation through your site and having it well indexed will make it easier, not just for visitors finding their way round your site, but for the search engines retrieving the pages and content. Don’t forget your links! Put links appropriately and in large volume to link the pages in your website, again it allows the search engines to find your pages easily.

A big no no is copying content from one page and pasting it onto another page on your site. By duplicating your content throughout your site you are giving your site a much lower ranking. Search engines really dislike this!

Don’t forget your description tag; this should be a descriptive summary of the page content.

The description tag is used for the summary of your page in the search engine results. Be sure to make it full keywords, but to still be readable and grammatically correct. Meta tags are slightly different as these are still information about a given web page, but they are not visible to the visitors on your site. These help search engines categorize your web pages correctly and are inserted into the HTML document.

Remember… It is vital that you track your sites SEO performance. Use tools provided for this like ‘Google Analytics’ and ‘Google Webmaster’. It enables you to see your sites ranking, measure its progression or its decline and permits you to change your tactics and strategies if need be.