There is a lot of talk these days about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Many companies are spending a lot of money to have companies come in and work with their websites so that their page show up on the first or second Search Engine Result Page (SERP). And it’s not a bad idea, since searches through the major search engines are the main way that many people will arrive at your site, and the money spent can yield some good return on investment if you have a good website.

However, most of us do not have a large (or even small) budget to hire someone to optimize our websites. So here are some cheap (as in FREE) things you can do to improve your website’s ranking.

1. Determine what your keywords are and use them frequently. Don’t go overboard, but as often as you can without making it unnatural, use the words that people will be searching for in your content. And try to use different combinations of words.
2. Use those keywords in page titles and paragraph headers. Search engines like Google know that if a word appears in a page title or paragraph header that is a good indication that the page content is about those terms, so it gives it more “weight”.
3. Keep adding fresh content to your site. Google and others like to see dynamic sites that have fresh content being added frequently. These types of sites are ranked as being more ‘relevant’ and thus are shown higher in the SERPs.
4. Don’t use graphics for text on your site. Search engines can’t read text if it’s part of a graphic, so as much as possible use ‘real’ text for all the content of your site.