I am a business owner, yet I don’t understand SEO, should I?

The answer is both yes, and no, SEO is incredibly complicated and yet isn’t exact science. You can, however, do some things that will improve your performance and by doing so have a very good chance of being able to get to a premiere position in the search engine results pages, if you follow the K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) method and do these 5 things every day.

1. Write something – The hardest thing you will do at times, writing has the most profound of impacts on SEO, as without content there is nothing to propel your website or social media accounts, nothing to push for driving back links, and nothing to separate you from your online competition.
2. Take pictures – When it comes to on page SEO and social media, photos are worth their weight in digital gold, these photos can be the crux of your writing and can generate social signals which Google uses to determine where to place your site amongst your online competition.
3. Repurpose everything – Using content in one place is hard, and if you do that you will never be able to keep up the pace of posting to all of your media each and every day. So if you’ve written a nice blog post and published it, use the photos that go along with it in your social media, then push that content to others via guest blogging, and if you have extra energy you could even tweak the content a bit and push it to article sites and/or press release publishers with links back to your website. Everything has more than one use, and you’d be silly to think you could write absolutely unique content for each and every online outlet today. Keep the anchor text variations, and watch your site rise in organic results.
4. Get and stay involved – Simply posting in blogs and forums in the comments or relevant conversations can assist you in providing some lift in search, these back links are not as powerful as they once were (thanks to link spammers), but the relevancy makes them more than what others will do, after all good SEO is really all about doing just a little more than your competition.
5. KEEP GOING – If you stop, the process stops, plain and simple freshness is a strong signal in search, your website, your blog, social media all depend on this never ending stream of relevant content to push out to the web.

If you do these 5 things every single day, you will notice large jumps in not only your search engine results performance, but web traffic as a whole. Then you can do some things with the extra revenue you are bringing in to actually remove your competition from the first page of Google completely, but that’s another story all together. Things like video, and podcasting, hangouts, and other types of consumable media are important too, do these basics really well and the rest will naturally happen.