Small businesses, start-ups and franchises are all monetizing Facebook pages, but you can’t figure out how to do it yourself.

As a small business owner you just don’t have the time to spend numerous hours going through every page and tweak every detail of your website to improve SEO. But, what if I told you that you could grab the attention of search engines and help boost your traffic with just a couple SEO tactics?

Over several weeks, with just these incredibly simple tactics, we were able to improve our SEO and drive in 681% more views per week!

Search Engine Optimization is a process to help get more traffic to your site by making it easy for search engines to understand what your site is focused on. Search engines see your beautiful website in a bunch of HTML or JavaScript statements, so it’s your job to tell the search engines exactly how wonderful your website really is.

There are countless ways on how to improve SEO, but there are a couple tactics that extremely easy and actually the most effective.

Keep on to check out these incredibly simple ways to improve SEO.

1. Keep a Clean Site Structure 

As mentioned before, the goal is to make your website easy for search engines to navigate through, so an organized website structure is crucial to guiding search engines throughout your site.

Imagine visiting a movie store, and you, acting as the search engine, are navigating through the store. The better the structure of the store, the quicker you will be able to point out exactly what you are searching for. Ultimately, you want the search engine to be able to navigate through your “store” and understand what your content is all about.

• Put your topics into categories
• Have internal links to your related articles with
   each other
• Use navigational links on the sides, top, or bottom of the page to help viewers find what they are looking for

2. Keywords

When determining what keyword to optimize for, you want to keep it specific to your target market.  There are many tools that can help you determine which keywords would be effective for each page of your website. So, you found a great keyword to drive in traffic, but how effective is it really? Keywords should focus on bringing in valuable viewers, those who are going to increase your conversion rates.

• Keep your keywords relevant to draw in viewers who WANT to be there
• Check the competition and try keywords no one else is
• Aim for the high volume searched keywords (but watch that competition!)
• Use keywords that result in increase conversions rather than views

Check out these optimization strategies for those tricky keywords!

3. Use those Meta elements!

Meta elements are used in HTML or XHTML to provide structured metadata for each page of your website. By including a Meta description and Meta keywords it gives search engines another way to determine what your website is about, which is the overall goal in order to improve SEO.

 Example shows the plug-in “All in One SEO” for WordPress

• Keywords in your title carry a lot of weight for search engines (but keep it catchy!)
• Keep the description concise and to the point to illustrate what your article’s all about
• Make sure to include those keywords you gunning for in as Meta keywords

4. Leverage Social Media 

Leveraging social media for SEO purposes does wonders for increasing traffic to your site. Besides the obvious benefit of getting exposure, it also attracts links and encourages sharing. It’s becoming an extremely important way to improve SEO. New ways to post and new social media sites are popping up all the time. As with all SEO, you must stay on top of the ever-changing social media.

• Build presence on major social media platforms
• Make use of tools such as Hash Tags and have viewers directed right to you!
• Include share buttons on your page for all the main social media sites
• Stay relevant!

5. Make some new friends

The links you have throughout your website have traditionally been the backbone for SEO. When another site has a link to your site, it is in essence a letter of recommendation to search engines. However “letters of recommendation” from various websites carry different weights, determined by their authority. So, try to maintain good relationships with those that contribute to your specific industry.

• Submit your website to various directories
• Non-profit sites generally have a higher authority
• Analyze back links from competitors

6. Narrate your images

Search engines are very good at understanding text on each page, but images simply look like a bunch of colored pixels. This is valuable information that is pertinent to the topic of our website, so how do help search engines understand them?

• Insert keywords into the Alternative Text
• Text that is near the image is used by search engines to understand the image

 Conclusion

When it’s all said and done, the most important thing is to try it, even if you don’t have the best keywords or links or whatever. If it does not pan out how you want to, then try again. And again. SEO is not a single event, but rather a process.

Let me know how these tips worked for you and any other ideas on how to improve SEO!

Meet Patrick Ryan

Pat is an SEO intern at Heyo, specializing in keyword optimization and blog management. He is currently pursuing bachelor's degrees in Management and Marketing Management from Virginia Tech. Pat likes the Baltimore Ravens, especially watching the Baltimore Ravens win the Super Bowl, and jamming out to music while he's in Google Adwords.