The good, bad and the ugly of SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a can mean good business for your website by pulling in a lot of visitors without paid advertising. SEO is optimizing your website so that it ranks higher on Google, Yahoo!, etc. This increases the chance of visitors to finding your site via a search engine because your website will show up in the top search results.

Bad SEO means that for a keyword search related to your business, you website is buried on page 13 of Google (for example). Most people don't click that far into the results. For a ranking that bad, your website might as well not show up in the search results at all.

The good news is that you can improve your search engine rankings with proper SEO techniques. Beware, however, there is a lot of SEO "snake oil" out there. That is, people peddling methods, techniques and services that will guarantee you top search results. As a rule of thumb, anyone who makes such a promise is lying.

The worst part is, some of these nefarious techniques can actually get your website banned by Google (and others). You will also suffer the embarrassment and a ruined reputation of trying to cheat in order to gain a few more visitors to your site.

Here are 3 easy ways to improve your SEO:

1. Quality, relevent content. The content on your site should be crisp and clear, letting visitors know exactly what you do without the use of too much jargon. Keywords in content are important, but don't oversaturate your site with keywords - it might bring you up a few notches in the search engines, but it will turn visitors away.

Also, your content should be dynamic. This means updating the content frequently (example: a blog) and keeping it updated.    

2.  Using headlines and breaking down long paragraphs. Search engines like headlines because they consider them more important than regular text. And breaking down long paragraphs into smaller ones will help visitors quickly scan your site and find what they are looking for.

3. Clean website design. This means avoiding the use of frames, Flash, and text-in-images. Search engines cannot read any of these things, so they are just wasted space and doing nothing to improve your SEO.

There is one more piece to the SEO puzzle that you don't have a lot of control over: The length of time your website has been up and active. Search engines love sites that have been around for a while.

Good SEO is something that will happen naturally if your site is designed properly with good content. It should not be forced. There are many more ways to improve your SEO, I just wanted to touch on a few so you get the idea.