Need some SEO help?

Listed below are simple and foolproof ways to spruce up your site.

1. Use common sense keywords on your site.
   You’d be surprised how many pages don’t include the most important keywords. For search engines, this is a problem because the page is not clearly relevant to the right searches. Targeted traffic boosts will occur if you boil it down to the basics to ensure that the good keywords appear on every page of your site. For example, the keyword “Nashville Orthodontist” is localized and reflects how people would search for orthodontists in a specific area.
   
2. Use the basic social channels of LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
   Social is not necessarily a big sales driver, but the links to your published pages from social channels give search engines clues to what your site is about. Plus, gaining followers on social channels will create a wide audience with which to share valuable business updates, i.e. discounts or specials, boosting traffic to the site and potential customers. Social media helps with link potential, not to mention profile ranking. First page organic search results typically include company social media sites.
   
3. Include your street address in your site footer for every page.
   Search engines want to know where you are. Including your street address on the bottom of every page helps search engines put you in a specific place in the world. Localization gives you a clear target audience and is more effective. If there’s a lot going on in the header, you can move some items to the footer. Doing so will reduce the amount of coding that search engines have to sort through when the page is loading. The load speed of a page is an essential SEO aspect that affects page rank.
   
4. Look at the mobile-friendliness of your site.
   Half of the traffic online is on mobile devices. According to a Google study on mobile search, 40 percent of mobile searchers are looking for local services or resources. If you’re not showing up well there, you’re missing a significant portion of the people you want to reach. It’s easy for people to leave your site if they can’t see it clearly on their mobile devices rather than suffer through the zooming in and extra scrolling. Responsive design sites are becoming more common and help create a site that is friendly for phones, tablets and everything in between.
   
5. Claim your Google Maps listing.
   Google Maps listings have always been a big SEO ranking factor. The integration of Google maps and business previews to Google+ Local has only made listings more important for businesses. Make sure to have an accurate name, address and phone number that matches the contact information on your website. The proximity of your business address to the Google marker, number of reviews, link quality and local citations also boost rank.
   
6. Keep your main page content updated.
   New content shows up better in search engines because the search engines like more recent information. If someone is searching for a trending topic, more recent results will come up first. Google has tweaked its algorithm to benefit sites that update on a consistent basis.
   

For more on content recency, check out the Search Engine People’s post.