Companies are even hiring people specifically to work on their SEO efforts. Last month, we dove into six basic tips to help you improve your website’s SEO rankings. And although these still don’t cover all the ways to improve SEO, we’re giving you five more to keep you going:
- Create an XML sitemap. Extensible Markup Language (XML) sitemaps inform search engines of new pages on your site that they might not find without being notified. You can generate yours fairly simply by visiting this XML sitemap generator.
- Use social media to build backlinks. Backlinks, otherwise known as inbound links, are incoming links to a website or web page. In other words, they are links—outside of your website—that point to your website. When you have more backlinks than other websites, search engines view your website as more important. Posting comments with your website link on another blog, or even just linking to your site via Twitter will increase your backlinks.
- Limit Flash. Some Flash animations make sense, but most times, they don’t. Since search engines can’t read Flash files, they don’t do anything for your SEO. For example, if a huge Flash animation is on your homepage—the most important page of your website—search engines will perceive it as worthless.
- Index your website. This is so simple—all you have to do is submit your URL to search engines like Bing,Yahoo! and Google. This will ensure that your website gets indexed within a few days, rather than weeks, months or even never! You can index your site by clicking on the hyperlinked search engines above.
- Research your competitors. Keep notes of the sites’ URLs, company names and page ranks (you can get this information using Alexa traffic rank). Check their pages regularly to see what they’re doing that is helpful and what is not, and learn from them.
Maintaining SEO is time consuming, and it can take up to six months or longer to see results—patience is important. But know that, if you’re doing SEO correctly, you will ultimately see improvement.
