1. Include White Papers and Tips Related to Your Area of Ex

Users interested in your products and services want to know how to use them to better their business, so give it to them. Your site should include white papers, tips, articles, and any other written material that users would find useful. The more useful the content, the more often they will come back for more. Return traffic is great in helping your rankings.

I recommend: Tap the knowledge base within your staff first. So many of your sales reps, administrators, specialists, front line personnel have knowledge to share with your customers. Invite them to write articles on topics important to customers. See an example here

2 . Keep Your Content Fresh

Google is looking for fresh and relevant content related to keywords. Ensure you have content that is “dynamic” (regularly changing or updated), especially on your home page. This can include new press releases, articles, case studies, product announcements, and service enhancements.

I recommend: Assign or hire an individual whose primary responsibility is ensuring your site content is always fresh. With most small businesses, this role can be assumed by your webmaster or marketing staff. If not, you can always outsource these services to a professional firm like 6smarketing.

3. Include Your Keywords in Your Browser Title

By doing this, you make it easier for Google to find you during a keyword search. You also want to repeat these keywords on many pages of your website, wherever applicable (it should not appear forced). This repetition also helps in increasing your relevance to the keywords.

I recommend: Do a search on Google.com for the keyword "marketing" and look at how many links have the word "marketing" in their page title.

4. Focus on 1 to 2 Keywords Per Page

The content of each page on your site should have a focused topic and use 1 to 2 keywords that are repeated throughout the page, starting with the page title, headlines, and body. The more focused and repeated the content is, the more searchable the page becomes.

I recommend: Review this page at dedicatedhosting.com and see how the keywords "Dedicated Hosting" is repeated in the title, headlines, and body of the page.

5. In-bound Links and Bookmarks

Other sites linking to your website is one big way Google and other search engines measure the popularity of your website. There is a whole cottage industry within the SEO business that focuses on generating as many in-bound links as possible to a site. Google has gotten wise on it and has changed its algorithm to detect such blatant practices. From what I understand, Google measures the relevance of both your content as well as the site linking to your site. If both sites appear to be relating to the same topic, the more relevant it is and better the ranking. This increases even further when a third site (and more) links to both and also shares the same topic. If you have more than one web site, ensure they are linking to one another. This can be done by having the links appear on every page in the footer in small, light grey text. Also, use sites like Digg.com to submit your white papers and articles and see if the community “diggs” your content. The more diggs, the more traffic.

I recommend: Digg.com  Reddit.com  Technorati.com