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3 Tips to Improve Your Business’ Rankings on Search Engines

BY NATALIE MCGUIRE

It wasn’t until 2009 that I started to become interested in search engine optimization (SEO.) I was doing some freelance web design work for a friend of mine, and once his site was live, he wondered where his customers were. The web site was beautiful and functioned perfectly, but unless potential customers searched directly for his company’s name, his site wasn’t showing up in search results. This didn’t make sense to either of us, after all, “if you build it they will come,” right? Wrong.

After numerous seminars and independent research, I’ve learned that this “Field of Dreams” philosophy doesn’t apply to the complex algorithms that search engines use to rank web sites on their results pages. True, a web site’s design, coding and copy writing play a major role, but they’re not the only factors. Business owners actually have a lot of control over their ranking if they’re savvy enough to take control of their search engine destiny.

The following are three easy tips to improve your web site’s ranking. (Bonus? No HTML knowledge required.)