If you don't have someone in your company that knows what the acronym "SEO" stands for, you're probably missing out on a lot of business.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, the practice of optimizing your website so that it comes up higher in search results at Google, et. al. It's very popular in industries such as mortgages, automobiles, electronics, etc. It's less common in our construction industry, which creates an opportunity for "early adopters."

While word-of-mouth and relationships drive most new business in construction, people do search the web to find subcontractors, re-modelers, and even GCs. It's worth it to make sure your site ranks well in the search engine results. Consider how often you Google to find just about anything…

At RiverGuide for Construction Software, we spend a lot of time on SEO and we've been making progress in this long, challenging process. To support this effort, we have one employee focused only on making our website come up higher in the rankings. Today I thought I would share some of our learning. Here's a five-step, high-level overview of how you can improve your search engine rankings.

1. Make your site accessible. If the search engines are going to rank your site, they need to be able to access and "index" it. So, you need to make sure all text is readable (not embedded in pictures). You also need to stick to HTML, rather than using too much fancy JavaScript. Also make sure that all the links within your site are live, not broken.
   
   
2. Choose your "keywords." Keywords are the words people search for (e.g. "construction software"). Do your best to think of all the words your potential customers might search for when looking for services like yours. For example, "heavy/highway contractors in Atlanta." Then use a tool like WordTracker to find more, learn how often they are searched and how many other sites are "competing" for them.
   
   
3. Optimize your pages. Next you want to optimize your pages so that the engines associate your chosen keywords with your site. Based on a balance of how often a keyword is searched and how competitive it is, place your best keywords in your page titles and elsewhere in your content. Keep in mind your website still has to make sense to humans; do not "keyword stuff."
   
   
4. Maintain good content. Search engines like to see lots of well-written content that is updated regularly. Of course, it should be "on topic" relative to your keywords. It also should be unique. Search engines often discount or ignore duplicate content that exists elsewhere on the web. Good content also attracts more links to your site, which brings us to the next step.
   
   
5. Recruit relevant links. Finally, search engines put tremendous weight in the volume and quality of websites that link to yours. Each quality link is considered a "vote" in favor of your site, so the site with the most links (all other things being equal) will rank the highest. Beware of how you get your links; buying links from "link farms" could actually hurt you more than they help. Yes, the links are the really challenging part of SEO.
   

As I said, this is just a high-level overview of SEO best practices. You could fill hundreds of pages with all the available SEO advice, debates and tricks. We believe, however, that you can win at this game if you just follow the rules and recommendations of the engines. It just takes a lot of hard work.