7 steps that could help boost your Google rankings

We've spoken to a lot of businesses recently and many have been concerned with the search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques and the performance of their website in Google. 

What's more, the way Google conducts its searches has changed recently and will continue to do so as it refines its algorithms even further in the coming months and years. 

Great quality content that's relevant and engaging to your customer or client base, delivered as part of a wider integrated marketing strategy is the best way to improve a website's performance - but there are a few steps businesses can take to keep up with Google's changes.

Writing articles, blog posts and landing pages that are relevant to your target market is just the first step of good SEO performance, making it easy to find is vital too. 

Google wants its users to find what they are looking for after just a few clicks, so think about the words and phrases your customers might type to locate your products and services - and use them.

Google and other search engines are working towards eliminating low-quality content, particularly websites that constantly update with a stream of articles stuffed with keywords.

So remove old, irrelevant posts and news articles before creating new, better quality content. In the meantime, this could help rectify a drop in search engine performance. 

Too many inbound links can be damaging to a website's SEO performance, but links from relevant, good quality sources could prove beneficial to Google's algorithms.

Great press releases are a good way to add relevant content to your site, while journalists and other news outlets may pick them up and rewrite them for their own pages. This is not only fantastic for free promotion, but the unique content could boost your website in return, as well as provide a good source of inbound links.

Are you using a blog to promote your business? You should be! It's another place for engaging content and issuing guest blogs to other, relevant websites provides yet another opportunity for an inbound link.

Your social media presence has never been more important, why miss out on the opportunity to talk about your business to the world? But that's not all, Google is now ranking real-time search results from social media networks on the first page of its results. 

Talk about the benefits of your products and services, answer customer queries and engage in conversations to improve your social media presence and harness the opportunity presented by real-time results. 

Once you've created an interesting, relevant and engaging blog post that has the appropriate number of keywords and has been promoted on your Facebook and Twitter pages, make sure Google can find it!

Meta tags, titles and descriptions must accurately reflect the content using appropriate keywords - but don't force them in, remember tip 2, quality over quantity.

Google will not penalise duplicate content, but it will omit it from search results. If you have spent time thinking about what your customers want to hear about and why they are arriving on your site, you should find it easy to create content that engages them.

Offenders of the following sins will be omitted from search engine results pages and hidden from potential customers' view: copy and pasting content from other web pages, displaying an RSS feed of someone else's blog or news articles and using 'canned' content that is distributed across a number of similar sites. 

When content is king, it's likely you'll take time to make sure your website is easy to navigate, looks great and invites plenty of engagement from your potential customers. So make sure this is not spoiled by badly placed advertising that interrupts the flow of the page. 

What's more, too many ads on one site looks like spam to Google, so choose adverts carefully, have them professionally designed and place them thoughtfully on the page for the best effect. 

Creating great quality content that your target market is searching for, without cutting corners or introducing underhand techniques is the best way to improve SEO performance. But it takes time, don't expect instant results, businesses will be rewarded in the long term for patient activity that engages customers and adds real value to their service offering. 

And remember, your online activity is just one part of your marketing strategy, your customers need consistent, engaging messages delivered from all angles using an integrated approach.

Adapted from the Social Media Examiner.