SEO, the art and science of ranking well in search engines, is one of those things that is easy to learn but hard to master, so let’s focus on the easy part first. You’ve got a website and it’s not ranking in Google well for whatever search term you are coveting. So what do you do?

Here are some simple things you can do:

1. Figure Out Your Target Audience
Until you know who you are targeting there is not much point in doing SEO. What words are your potential customers searching with when you want to be found? Are they ready to buy? Are they just doing research? Are they big spenders or are they cheapskates?

2. Update Your Page Titles
The page title or “title tag” is perhaps the most important element of SEO. These are the words that appear at the top of your web browser when you are on a page. They are also the words that show up in the blue links in Google. Put the search terms you are targeting in your page titles.

3. Make Each Page Title Unique
It is also important that all of the pages on your site have unique page titles. A quick way to see if you have more than one page with the same title is to do the following search in Google:

site:yoursite.com intitle”the words in the title”

4. Add Internal Links
The number of links a page gets from its own site and which pages link to it matters. The home page is the most important on the site and so the pages that are linked to from the home page are also important.

5. Add Your Address to Every Page
Ideally, every page should have your address and phone number. This is helpful for users but it also reinforces your location to the search engines.

6. Claim Your Profile on Merchant Circle, Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, etc.
There are a huge number of yellow pages-like sites that allow you to update your business information for free. These sites get a lot of traffic and tend to rank well.

7. Get Links
Now none of the above stuff will work very well if you don’t have any links to your site. The big search engines look at links from other sites as a sign of quality and trust.

There are hundreds of ways to get links like writing articles for other sites, sending out press releases, adding your business info to social media sites, etc.

Newpath WEB is a leading SEO company in Australia that offers Search Engine Optimization services to improve your Local or Global presence. Newpath WEB offers complete search engine ranking solutions for Google, Yahoo, MSN and other major search engines. For more info visit: http://www.newpathweb.com.au/