SEO is an ever evolving industry and to stay ahead of the curve you must not only know the technical intricacies of the beast but also what small changes can produce the biggest impacts (some good, and some bad). Today we are going to give you a head start with 5 immediate simple ways you can start improving your rankings today!

1. Make sure you sign up with Webmaster Tools

For both Google and Bing there is a master resource for your website where you can monitor your site health, traffic, keywords, rankings, optimization, errors, crawl status, pages, delivery, sitemaps, robots and much much more. Now this may not sound like much to you, but if you are NOT using these tools to optimize your website you are leaving a large amount of your SEO strategy up to chance, and that is never a profitable undertaking.

2. Set up Google Authorrank

You see the little social icons and personal pictures in Google all the time now, and this is Google authorrank at work. Bottom line is this, if you write online, you should get credit for the content you are producing. Authorrank will enable you to do exactly that by recoding all the content you write and also by helping to catch the eyes of web traffic. (Statistically speaking google authorrank links get clicked on up to 150% times more than regular links!)

3. Consider the keywords you want to rank for

You should be realistic with your ranking expectations. By that I mean that some websites no matter how good or how big their budget is, will have a very hard time rankings for terms that are simply just too competitive or have been optimized already by big corporate entities. Chances are they have bigger budgets for SEO and will squash you like a cockroach if you try to impede on their business.

It is much better to have a longer keyword that is based on the mindset of the user who wishes to buy your product or service, saving you time and money wasted on keywords from users who are in the informational mindset.

You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner to find which keywords are searched and how many times monthly to give you a better understanding of your marketplace, and how competitive it will be to rank for.

A neat trick we use is to install “Search Meter” on our WordPress websites in order to monitor website visitor searching habits and then cater to their search needs with content based around those keywords!

4. Create Amazing Rich Valuable Content!

This one may seem simple but is actually the hardest item on this “simple” list. Creating content is one thing, but creating content that is not only rich (images, titles, structure) as well as valuable (serves a purpose for the reader) is a totally other topic altogether.

Whatever your business, make sure your content is engaging and memorable. Make sure it is resourceful and worth bookmarking and you will find your traffic and website growth match accordingly. Sites with great content grow on their own organically without the need for much marketing, while sites with plain boring content get lacklustre traffic and growth to match.

5. Share, share share!

With the advent of social media it has become easier and easier than ever before to share your content around the web. Utilize the simplicity of this social age we live in by making it easy as pie for your visitors to share your content around the web. Having a simple button for facebook, twitter, linkedin, and others is a must for any great websites content strategy.

A useful tool is AddThis.com which allows you to integrate simple sharing across an array of social mediums and as a bonus is extremely simple to install to any website. We recommend it thoroughly!

So there you have it, 5 easy ways you can start improving your SEO and get your rankings to start climbing today! Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any tips or tricks to share, we know there are other things you can be doing to optimize for the web but we wanted to share these simple ones to get the ball rolling!