Six Easy Small Business SEO Tactics - Search Engine Optimization That Most People Ignore

SEO is hard today.
After Google's efforts in the last few years in making its search algorithm better, web spam has come down on a great deal. Today, SEO is all about pure content marketing; only high quality content ranks well in web searches. Social media has also assumed a greater part in SEO. Still, to facilitate the ranking of your site, you can make a few adjustments. In this article, you will find a few very easy tactics that many webmasters miss.

1. Social Media Profile Tweaking
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are the most important social media sites today. If you are in a specific niche, you may need to work on specific social media sites (such as GitHub and StackOverflow for programmers). Your social media profile should be properly designed with your company logo, a brief and catchy description, and other relevant information. Also, ensure that your company's employees are members in all social media profiles.

In order to optimize the social media sites for local searches, you should add your company's address, phone number, ZIP code, etc. Additionally, you should link your social media profiles with your company blog and other public data streams so that these social media profiles are rich with content. Ensure also that the keywords that describe your company appear in this content.

2. Optimize Images and Your Company Logo
 On your website, you may have a number of images. Webmasters who do not do SEO may name these images something like "image#.jpg." Such naming is not going to help a search engine understand what the said image is of. Instead, you can instruct your web-design team to properly describe each image and include the ALT tag.

The same applies when it comes to your company logo. You should ensure that the logo is named after your company and, if possible, also the primary product. For instance, if you are a storage technology provider, then your logo may be named something like "company-name-storage.png." And ensure that the logo links to your company's home page.

3. Keyword Formatting
When you prepare content for your website or blog, you may identify certain keywords. It will pay to appropriately highlight these keywords, by bolding, italicizing, or underlining them. Not only the keyword density but how you present the keywords also matters for high ranking. This is the reason why top keywords should appear in heading tags and title tags.

Link to Quality Resources
Not only incoming links but also outgoing links are important. Google warns you not to link out to bad neighborhood sites. In the same way, linking out to high-quality articles and resources increases the trust on your website. In addition, if you have a habit of linking out to good websites, people may link back to your website too.

5. Content Depth
These days, the content that ranks high comes with in-depth information. Articles with more than a thousand words tend to rank high in Google. This does not mean that you should inflate the article you write by adding some additional, empty words. The article should be deep and thorough throughout. A high-quality article will rank high despite its word count.

6. Do What Google Webmaster Tools Tells YouAlthough minor, Google Webmaster Tools' suggestions can very much improve your site. It is, therefore, recommended that you check Webmaster Tools on a regular basis and get some tips. HTML improvements, page-loading speed, rich text information, site errors, robots.txt information, connectivity to server, etc., are analyzed and reported by this Google tool. It's very easy to improve your site with the data provided by Google Webmaster Tools. Additionally, if you are optimizing your site for Bing, you can use Bing Webmaster Tools.

Conclusion
As you can see, optimizing your site for better search ranking is not a difficult thing to do. If you do some of these easy tasks that do not take much of your time, you can achieve better ranking. However, it's the quality of content on your site that ultimately determines your site's SEO positions.