Is your first instinct to click away after you read the headline? Is search engine optimization something you have avoided dealing with?

Well, be brave! Face your website now! I’ll give you some simple tips you can do to improve the ranking of your website. In order to increase your online presence and along with that, increase your sales, it is essential that your website shows up on the first page of the search engines.

85% of people find goods and services that they need through search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and MSN. The whole idea of search engine optimization is to attract targeted customers who are more likely to make a purchase. The better placed your page is on the search engine, the greater traffic will find it. That’s what search engine optimization is about.

You can hire an expert who has all the technical skills to optimize your site or you can make a few simple changes, some small adjustments and improve your rankings rapidly.

Here are 7 simple steps you can take:

• What does the colored bar at the top of your browser say when you access your home page? The words in your title bar should contain the most important keywords or phrases, including your company name. I prefer to have your “tag line” ahead of your name. For example, “Search Engine Optimization Experts | SEOMasters”.
• Give each of your pages a unique name using your keywords and phrases and including your company name. Keep the titles down to about six words or less. Try not to repeat the titles and don’t have identical words next to each other.
• Do you have a squeeze page with a scintillating graphic? You may be missed by the search engines. Sites that contain quality content rather than loaded with graphics are favored by search engines. The content should contain the most important keywords – things your site visitors are search for – and it should make sense. Don’t over do it.
• Your pages should have 100 to 250 words per page if you want to achieve a high ranking. Of course, the content has to make sense and the search engines must be able to read the text. They can’t read graphics so be sure it is in HTML format. If you have a graphic with text, that will not be found by the search engines.
• Now I have to get a little technical. You will want to check the meta tags. Meta tags have only a limited effect in adding to high search engine rankings but it is still worth it for the search engines that use meta tags in their ranking formula.In order to do this, go to the “View” button in your browser and select “Source”. This brings up a window showing the code that your web page is built with. A meta tag would read: meta name=”keywords” content=. If it is not there, have your webmaster add it for you. Every little bit helps.
• Search engines use link popularity to rank your website. If you have good quality, relevant sites linked to your site, you may actually improve your site rankings. Do a search for a free link popularity checker and you can find a tool that will show you what sites are linked to yours.If your site doesn’t come up with very many links, you can check out the rankings of sites you want to link with and then contact them to see if they will share links reciprocally with you. Better quality traffic will then be directed to your site.
• You can use Alexa.com to check traffic to your site. Also having Google Analytics tracking code installed will help you see where your traffic is coming from, what they are looking at, how long they are staying on site, their entrance page and exit page and much more.

So, take a breath and try some of these steps to boost your rankings yourself. Search engine rankings are important for successful internet marketing so get started and direct more quality visitors to your site.