If you run an online business you should know the importance of having your website stand out from your competitors. If you've been in the business long enough, you should also know that in order to get your website “out there” and above the rest of the clutter, you need to optimize your website, and you do this through search engine optimization. Typically you'd do this by consulting a search engine marketing expert; you would rely on their expertise on the subject to help push or market your website to get it “out there” so people will sit up and notice it, and ultimately visit your site and make a purchase. But if you're looking for some easy tips that even someone who's clueless about search engine optimization can follow and keep up, here are 3 unbeatable ones that you can't go wrong with.

If your business has a blog of its own, you need to be aware of the importance of footer text. The very reason you have a blog in the first place is to bring in traffic and subsequently direct it to your main website, and also to get backlinks as ways to get people to notice your site. A footer text is that small little text at the bottom of a page. Typically it's just text comprising of a copyright notice, but it can also be made into a clickable text linking to other pages. Search engines usually look out for keywords found on specific areas of the page, namely the header, footer, images, and links. This is important to note because what you choose to put in the footer will determine how your website is ranked. If the word you put in happens to be amongst the highest searched query amongst search engines, your website will be ranked high in the search results, thereby making it prominent to searchers. However there are a few things you need to be careful with so that your site won't be penalized by search engines for being too “spammy”. No-no's include adding lots of external links to the footer, and adding irrelevant links to your website or blog.

Another tip you can consider is to avoid getting your website banned from Google. In fact, you might already have gotten yourself banned without even realizing it. Getting a Google ban will put a significant dent to your online marketing efforts, because it means that your website would have been dropped from Google's index, and would not show up in the results of its target keyword. This will ultimately result in less or even no traffic at all for your site. If your site is deemed to not be within Google's webmaster guidelines or if the amount of queries you perform is deemed too aggressive, then Google will penalize and block your IP address. Some of the things you should avoid doing include having hidden or invisible text that you hide from your visitors, repeating the same keyword over and over (also known as spamming or keyword stuffing) in any part of your website (the title especially) so as to increase ranking, and copying content from other blogs rather than writing your own content for your blog.

One last tip is to optimize your website by geographic location. This is especially important if you're selling a particular product in just a specific location, because by optimizing your site to just the specific location you're doing business in, you'll be able to attract more visitors from that particular area. You can do this by including the name of the location you're doing business in (e.g. Product Name Location), adding the physical address of your business in the page footers of your site, or posting advertisements of your website on local classified directories.

While there are many other tips that can help you optimize your website, these are just some of the tips that any search engine marketing expert will suggest to you should you approach one.