The real secret to SEO is that there are no secrets or black magic at all, just hard work depending on the desired keywords. Search engine optimization requires a systematic approach of proven techniques.

The good thing is the steps which give you the best bang for buck are simple to implement. I'd like to share these 14 SEO Boosting tips from our internal 75 point SEO checklist, to help you rank your business website. I've used a tick to indicate the relative importance of the SEO tip.

• Keywords in domain name and URL

Keywords in your domain name will give the biggest ranking boost. It is generally not worthwhile to move an existing estabilshed website to a new URL specifically for this reason, as there are other factors like domain age which will have an effect. So if you are creating a new web page consider keywords in the domain name.

Keywords in URLs also contrubute to ranking (ie www.website.com/keyword/keyord2.html). Don’t create long URLs to stuff keywords, you wont be penalized, but it is a deterrent to others linking to your site, confusing to users, and dilutes the effectiveness of each keyword. For optimized ranking, URL's should ideally be no longer than 68 characters, including the www.

• Keywords in <title> tag

Page titles are extremely important for ranking. The text inside the <title> tag displays at the top of the browser when viewing the web page, and more importantly, in search results as your page title. A maximum of 65 characters are displayed, so don’t use more than this and keep your priority keywords near the beginning.

• Unique content

Having unique, relevant content, different from content on other websites, and not duplicated on your own website, provides a great foundation for your site's rankings.

• Number of backlinks

Generally the more, the better. But links must be of some quality to be any value. The linking site should have related website content, and use keywords in the anchor text. This encourages search engine bots to visit and index your site more often.

• Site Accessibility

Your site needs to be search engine friendly. This is too often neglected. 404 errors, and broken links reduce the ability to index a site. Use Google webmaster tools for free 404 error reporting regularly.

• Keywords in headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags)

Keywords in headings count, one or two appearances is enough.

• Keywords in <alt> tags

Search engines don't read images but they do read their text descriptions in the <alt> tag.   Fill in all the <alt> tags with keywords describing the images.

• Keywords in anchor text 

Very important, particularly for the anchor text of backlinks, the keywords used in anchor text are considered important to the content on the page. Please don’t use “click here” or other non-descipt phrases in anchor text!

• Internal linking

Try to include links to relevant pages on your website. This improves the ranking of your pages by sharing the pagerank between them, and navigation. You can use this technique to empasise your important pages.

• Frequency of content change

If you regularly add new content to your site you not only grow rankings but encourage search engines to index your site more often. 

• Keywords in the beginning of a document

Placing keywords closer to the beginning of a document improves ranking, as they are more prominent on the page. It should be easy to include the keywords in the first paragraph describing the page.

• <Description> metatag

Google uses the description tag to describe your website in search results, when it is relevant to the search terms. Just like the title tag, Google shows a limited number of characters, so keep the description under 150 characters.

• Keywords formatting

Bold, italics and font size are another way to emphasize important words and phrases.

• Sitemap

A sitemap is great for prompting search engines to index a new website, but following that the benefit is really internal linking - an additional page linking to your main pages.

It’s a good idea to spend some time assessing and correcting your small business website with these SEO tips. You can then use them to improve rankings with each new article you add to the site. Feel free to break a "rule" here and there where the user experience might suffer.

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