Improve Search Engine Rankings

Tips to Help You Improve Search Engine Rankings for Your Clients

Have your web design clients ever asked you about how to get found and improve their search engine rankings? Improving search engine results ethically isn’t a quick or easy process, but can be done by using a best practices approach and by knowing what the search engines looks for when populating their natural listings. Here are 3 ways to improve search engine rankings without getting too technical and without using spammy techniques. Offer these tips to your clients when they ask you about how to improve their search rankings, and you’ll be in prime position to resell SEO to them.

• Be more relevant: Nothing is better for improving search engine results than being more relevant than your competitors. Tell clients to show their knowledge of their market space in their website’s copy. Tell them to write articles, blog about industry news and trends, uncover new findings, expose industry scandals, and keep up with the times. Search engines love interesting, fresh content, and your clients will improve their natural rankings if they deliver content that people actually want to read. If they create content that other relevant websites link back to, they’ll see an even greater impact on their performance in the search engines, as the engines consider back-links votes of confidence.

• Be Focused: Tell your clients not to take a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ approach. If they are promoting their widget business online, make sure the website talks about widgets. The widget website is not the place to talk about politics, the news, or celebrity gossip—they can always create a separate blog for these topics. By keeping a tight focus on the content of the website, they’ll naturally be using the keywords that are applicable to the website, and will be able to take advantage of the long-tail of search. And tell them not to ramble on either. Keep the copy concise but precise, so that your clients are not sending mixed signals to the search engines AND to their visitors.

• KISS: Keep things simple and to the point. Search engines can’t read content that is embedded in flash and animated images, and very often the effects that seemed so cool 3 years ago are annoying to your visitors today. Use simple, text-based navigation that the search engine spiders can crawl and follow, and keep the page content organized with headings and bullets that get right to the point. Make sure the website has a sitemap that search engines can use to spider each and every page on the website (especially if it’s a large commerce website), and name pages in a way that is easy to understand and descriptive. Tell your clients not to get superfluous with their content; Every page must be meaningful and must add value to the user experience. Search engines are in the business of providing information, so anything that your clients can do to enhance the user experience will go a long way in improving their search engine rankings.

Clearly, doing the things mentioned above is easier said than done. Website owners will look to their trusted designers and developers to help them improve their search engine results. Turn this opportunity into revenue by becoming an SEO reseller today.