One of the easier ways to improve your search ranking and get your site on the front page of Google is to add unique, valuable content.

You hear 'content is king' all the time, but businesses continue to live with 5 or 6 page websites and expect to compete in the crowded web world.

If your website is structured correctly, it can be easy to add new content about topics you know very well. The first place to go to as a source of this content is your own knowlege about your business.

This knowledge can be turned into content and published on your website. Over time your website will grow and become more attractive to both the search engines and people.

Not only that, fresh unique content is easier to share.

1. Keywords - focus your content on search phrases

Keywords or search phrases are a representation of how your audience expresses their need, so your content should respond directly to that need.

Do some research to find out what terms people are using and in what volumes.

You can get the information from:

• Your analytics tool (we recommend Google Analytics) will show you what terms your visitors are already using
• Keyword research tools such as Wordtracker, Market Samurai, Google's Keyword Research Tool etc
• Competitor sites
• Trade publications

Don't rely on a couple of short general phrases - people search using a huge range of variations based around a 'seed' word. You may have heard this referred to as the longtail.

2. Structure your site to grow

Your site must be structured in a way that it can grow.

This means having different sections for each of your target keywords groups is critical.

A keyword group is a collection of keywords that contain your seed word.

For example a keyword group around the seed phrase 'bead jewellery' might contain the search terms "bead jewellery for beginners", "diy bead jewellery", "glass bead jewellery tutorial", "create your own bead necklace" etc

Within each section, you then add a page for each individual keyword phrase.

For example:

(We are not experts in Ginea Pigs - this is just to illustrate the point!)

So imagine if your site had a page 'Our services' with a list of the services you offer all on one page.

This one page will be difficult to optimise. You can only target one or two keywords per page.

This is why web people who know anything about SEO will talk about the underlying structure being critical.