These days it is common to hear a lot of new buzz-words and acronyms being thrown around when it comes to internet marketing. But among the most common (and important) terms to know and understand is SEO: Search Engine Optimization. SEO simply means optimizing your business’ website so it shows up higher in the rankings of search engines like Google and Bing. SEO involves pinpointing the keywords that your customers are using to locate businesses like yours, and optimizing your website so search engines believe it is the most relevant to those keywords. Why is it important? Because search engines are becoming the primary way that customers search for products, so it is important your website to rank highly. Here are four basic tips for small businesses for how to make their websites more competitive in the search-engine ranks:

1) Some HTML editing

While search engine optimization does require a little bit of HTML knowledge, don’t fear! The edits you can make on you website are simple and don’t require being a computer master. It is important that search engines can quickly read every page on your website to understand what it is all about. They do this by scanning each page’s Title tags, Meta tags, H1 tags, and more – but these three are the most important. Learn about how to edit these features to include keywords and terms that are the most relevant – and the most heavily searched for – in your industry.

2) Content

People who design search engines edit the algorithm used by these engines every day to ensure that only the most relevant and informative sites are being ranked highly. This is why it is important to take another look at your website’s content: is it fluff that simply talks about how great your business is over and over? Or does it provide the user with actual, useful answers to their questions? Run through your site to look for spelling and grammar errors, make sure that you are clear and concise, and be sure to throw in valuable keywords. But don’t overdo it: “keyword stuffing” is a common mistake made by many business owners. Remember that search engines are smart, and they can tell when you’re trying to fool them.

3) Internal and External Links

Linking is one of, if not the most, powerful tools behind increasing your business’ SEO success. Linking is both internal and external: internal links are links from one page to another within your site, and external links are links on other websites that point to your site. When editing internal links, be sure to select anchor text – the text that the user read and clicks on – that is relevant and features important keywords. External links are arguably the most important feature of a good SEO strategy but also one of the hardest to obtain. The most important thing to learn about external links is that, while it is tempting to try to “fool” search engines by figuring out quick ways to include your links all over the internet, this is not always useful. You need actual people and companies to decide to link to your site because the content is useful – search engines do in fact know the difference!

4) A social media presence

Social media is playing more and more of a role in how search engines decide which sites are useful. If you include important pages or updates about your company on other sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and especially if your followers re-post that update – search engines will consider your content to be valuable and relevant. Encourage your followers to re-tweet or re-post the posts you make on social media sites – it can definitely impact your business’ rankings and ultimately bring in more traffic to your website.