Trying to get your new website to appear at the top of search engines can seem like a daunting task. It can be challenging but also rewarding. There are many ways to optimize your site for search engines, some easier than others. We will discuss three things that anyone can do that will not cost a dime.

3 Simple and Free Ways to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

First, one of the most important things you can do is create great content. One of the best and most successful ways to create content is simply starting a blog. This gives you not only an opportunity to expound on your products or services, but allows you to actively engage with your audience. Your customers or clients can post comments and ask questions about your post allowing you to engage with them. Not only that, but a simple blog can greatly expand your audience. This is due to that fact that you are creating more potential keywords for which someone may search. This is great for businesses that have a very narrow or niche audience. Follow these three simple rules when creating content:

• semantically comprehensive wording – simply include relative and related terms
• length – longer is generally better
• media enriched content – include videos and graphics in your post

Not only you will see the number of views increase, you should see an increase in your ranking on search engines, according to Search Metrics.

The next thing you can do is become an active member of social media sites. Social media allows you to easily share your content with a much wider audience, since about 75 percent of adults are social media sites, according to Pew Research Center. Search engines use tweets, likes, plus ones, etc to know where and what is good content. This is why 83 percent of Fortune 500 companies have Twitter accounts and have tweeted within the past 30 days, according to the latest research from Dartmouth. 80 percent of these companies are also on Facebook. So, sign-up on social media sites and publish your content to them. The more shares, likes, tweets, etc you get, the higher you will move up in rank because search engines view these as “votes” for you.

The last thing, although often the hardest, is link building. Search engines put a great emphasis on links pointing back to your site. There are a number of ways to get quality backlinks, such as having your customers link to you or creating great content that inspires people to share it.  Another way to build links is to post or comment on other blogs and tie it to a blog post you wrote. You never know, the person may read your post, find it insightful, then add a link on their site that points to your post. You should also add links referencing other peoples websites because they will notice and will probably return the favor. The most important thing to consider when trying to build links is to go after quality links. Two or three links from reputable sites are better than 10 from non-reputable sites. In addition, do not be spammy about backlinks because that will actually lower your rankings on search engines. For even more ways to get backlinks, check out Moz Free SEO Guide.

If you actively start implementing these three things you should see not only your traffic increase but your ranking in search engines increase. You would be surprised at just how fast you can move up the ranks. I have been working with North Main Street church of Christ, trying to boost their rank by applying these ideas and we have seen tremendous results. Our search terms include six variations of the word “church” or “churches” plus the city in which the church is located. In less than a month, we have gone from an average rank of 45 to an average rank of 17, with some ranks being as high as 11. As you can see, with just a little effort you can greatly improve your search engine ranking, which will in turn increase the number of visitors on your site.