Cheap and easy ways to increase your SEO rank. (part 1)

A few weeks back, I was given the task of designing a new website for Ameronix. Our old site was extremely too corporate, bland and outdated. It didn't recognize us for the talent and capabilities that the employees who make up this company have. Many design firms will hire other design firms to rebrand, redesign, and/or overhaul their existing brand identity. This is largely due in part to the difficulty of designing for oneself but also the bias one can have given this situation. Along with having almost complete control of the new website design, I was also given the task of SEO.

Search Engine Optimization kind of crept out of no where in the past few years. It has taken the internet by storm, and for good reason. SEO is the way in which you can optimize your website to best be crawled by the search engine spiders. While there are numerous ways to increase your rank, most of which may best be accomplished by professional SEO businesses, there are many basic things that many web designers may overlook.

I am not writing this to help you get your site from the 15th page to the first page. I am merely offering you the ability to possibly increase your SEO rank but more importantly your ROI. Return on investment is measured by an increase in consumer spending on your site or with your company relative to what you have put in to said site and company. Doing free and easy basic SEO is a surefire way to increase your ROI because it is free to you. Below you will find the most common ways to help optimize your site for the major search engines.

Unique Page Title
Often times a company completely overlooks the easiest way to increase their SEO rank. The title tag is what displays on the top most portion of your browser window and also serves as the title on the search results page of major search engines google, yahoo, ask, microsoft live, and msn. Often times you will come across a title that remains static on each page and usually consists of the company's name. This is the best way to forfeit good SEO points! All titles should attempt to include relavent keywords and a description of what the page is about. This also means that each and every title should be dynamic – change on every page. If the domain for your company is AppleOrangePear.com and a search is done on appleorangepear, you will always be on the first page, if not the first result. This eliminates the need to place your company name in the title bar as the FIRST element.

Content, Content, Content
Relavant content is arguably the most important SEO ranking factor amongst the SEO gurus of the web. All content for a website should be extremely well written and should always include keywords. Back in the early SEO days, many websites used keyword padding as an effective means of ranking higher on the search results page. This has since been eliminated with extremely smart algorithyms that are used to calculate and rank each website. Now, it is all about writing content that is unique, informational and structured. When writing content for the web, it is important to start your opening paragraphs broad and slowly drill down to the specifics as you go on. You should also be writing content that is unique and isn't already plastered all over the web in the same manner you have. Make sure your content stands out, is engaging, and is worth the read.

Meaningful Anchor Text
What is anchor text? Anchor text is the "proper" name for the links on your site, also referred to as the "a tags." More likely than not, you may have some links that are as follows: click here!, read more..., launch, download, etc... While these may make sense to the users on the page who are able to relate where the link it positioned to what the link says, it is not very good for the spiders. You want your anchor text to be as descriptive as possible without over doing it. If you are trying to sell fresh fruit and would like to link to some new products, you may find yourself quick to type "Check out our new products!" More appropriately you would do something like, "New fresh bruit baskets now available." The tells both users and spiders alike that they should expect to see some awesome new fruit baskets on the next page and not some mystery product. This may seem small and unimportant as first, but once you go through an entire site and keep tally of the nondescript anchor tags, you will begin to see why this all adds up.

Check out part 2 for more Cheap and easy ways to increase your SEO rank