In the world of modern business, customer bases are largely built online.  This makes it incredibly important for your business to have a well-developed search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign.  This is not something that can be developed overnight: you need solid IT support, staff who understand SEO, and an ongoing commitment to ensuring that your strategy is being pushed forward at every turn.

However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a handful of handy, one-time tips that can help to give your website a noticeable boost up the rankings.  Here are just a few of them:

Improve Your Site Speed

Site speed can help to improve your authority and rankings, but for the less technologically minded of you, your first response to this proposition is probably not ‘great’ but ‘how?’  It’s easier than you might think.  One of the simplest ways to improve the speed of your site is to take your images and reduce their file size.  You can do this in two ways: firstly, reduce their physical size; secondly, strip the meta data associated with the images.  You could also try deleting any plugins that you don’t really use, and installing a good caching plugin.

Implement SSL Encryption

Google has made it clear that site security counts amongst their ranking factors.  Although having a HTTPS site won’t automatically take you to the top of the list, it should be enough to give you a small boost.  Commentators have also pointed out that its importance is likely to increase as time passes, so installing SSL encryption now might well pay off further down the line.  On top of that, it will also benefit your users.

How to seo your website for beginners by SEOPlanter, on Flickr.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

Integrate Your Social Media

Social media is important in and of itself, but clarifying your relationship with your social media accounts can also help a search engine to better assess your overall web presence.  Handily, it’s also a very simple change to make.  All that you have to do is include links to your social profiles in the footer of your home page.  It might also be useful to ensure that your users can share any blog posts or other content via the various different platforms without leaving your site.  As well as potentially boosting your rankings, this has the added advantage of making it easier for your customers to talk about your brand on social media applications.

Optimise Your Site for Mobile Use

The number of people who now access the internet from their mobile has soared over the last few years, and the trend shows no signs of abating.  Thus, it’s important to make sure that you not only show up in computer-based searches, but also mobile ones, and you can’t do that unless your site is optimised for mobile devices.  Google doesn’t care how you do it, just that you do it.

Regularly Update Your Content

Another factor that counts towards your Google ranking is how often your site is updated, so the more active you and your staff members are, the higher you’re likely to soar. There’s no need to overhaul your site completely (unless it needs it); just make sure that your blog and news page see some action from time to time.

For the most part, many of these strategies can only really be used once.  Applied in isolation, they’re likely to have no discernible effect; however, use them together and you might just see your rankings begin to soar.