Is your site plummeting down the search engine results page? Put these five easy-to-implement tips on your to-do list to boost your search results rankings, drive traffic to your site and generate buzz.

By Kristopher Jones

I attend dozens of conferences and seminars on digital marketing throughout the year, and each one is helpful--even if just for networking and building contacts. However, I've found that many of the educational sessions focus more on high-level theory or case studies too specific to the particular company to offer much to the audience. They tend to be interesting, but provide little that an online marketer can take back to the office.

With this in mind, I offer these five actionable tips to enhance your search engine optimization efforts and drive traffic to your site.

Add Reviews to Your Website
Adding reviews to your e-commerce website can have a positive impact on your search-engine rankings, while enhancing the overall credibility and sales of your site. Reviews provide an opportunity for your website visitors to learn from previous customers, while providing you with fresh user-generated content, which search engines love.

User reviews have the same selling power as a testimonial. If you offer a product or service, customer reviews can help increase sales. People find comfort in knowing that others have used the product or service with good results. While you may be concerned that users will provide negative reviews of your products, the positive effect of having user reviews on your website far outweighs the risk of an occasional negative review.

Adding the ability for users to review products on your website is an effective approach to keeping your content fresh. Each review adds content to your site that is often keyword rich for your product or service. User-generated content is free and tends to be favored by search engines because it is seen as authoritative.

User reviews get your customers involved and active on your site. A user who may be considering purchasing a product on your site may come back frequently to check reviews to help in the decision-making process. The more active your users are, the more likely they are to find your site credible--and to eventually become a customer.

Adding a review script is easy and inexpensive. For example, Review-Script (review-script.com) provides an Amazon-style review script that allows users to rank a product or item on a scale of one to five stars and make comments related to the item for others to read. The Review-Script website includes a demo so that you can preview the script and get some ideas on how it can be best used on your site.

Acquire Quality Links
You can save yourself a tremendous amount of time and effort if you focus your energy on acquiring a few, high-quality, authoritative links versus a large number of lower-quality links that are not directly related to your website. You can easily build a large quantity of links back to your page by either manually submitting or purchasing software that mass submits your web page to thousands of online guest books, forums, blogs, directories and other link sources.

However, this type of activity is often detected as spam by search engines and should therefore be avoided. Search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable of discerning the differences between natural, relevant links, and unnatural, irrelevant links such as those typically submitted by software.

Just one or two high-quality links can provide the same, if not greater, search engine benefit than hundreds of low-quality links. All the major search engines, particularly Google, embrace this approach to link building.

Google uses a numerical system called PageRank--or PR--to express an opinion on the relative authority of a web page. Google assigns every web page on the Internet a PageRank value of 0 to 10 based on a calculation of the quantity and quality of backlinks. Typically, the higher the quantity and quality of backlinks, the higher the PageRank. When prospecting link partners, you can easily check the PageRank of their page and get a general feel for how important that link may appear in Google's eyes. Check a site's PageRank by installing the Google Toolbar (available for download at toolbar.google.com) or by visiting pagerank.net (a site not owned by Google).

Many industry insiders believe that Google and other leading search engines such as Yahoo rank websites based on how "trusted" they are in their individual niches. In fact, Yahoo has published a paper that uses a technique called TrustRank for semi-automatically separating useful web pages from spam. This score, known as a site's TrustRank, is not made available to the public; however, you can assume that sites that rank highly by Google's and Yahoo's algorithm for competitive keywords likely possess a high trust score.

Maximize Exposure With StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a peer and social networking technology that includes a toolbar you install in your web browser; you can use this toolbar to discover and rate web pages, videos, photos and news articles. The StumbleUpon service also allows you to submit your own web pages, videos, photos and news articles, all of which can help you generate buzz and traffic, as well as build backlinks to your website.

As an Internet user, you surf the web and encounter countless websites throughout the day that you like or dislike. By installing and using the StumbleUpon toolbar you can rate websites by clicking a "thumbs up" button on the toolbar when you are on a site you like, or clicking a "thumbs down" button when you see a website you dislike.

In addition to voting on websites you come across on your own, the StumbleUpon toolbar allows you to randomly visit other websites by clicking the Stumble button. When you click the Stumble button, the StumbleUpon algorithm displays websites that you may find interesting based upon your personal interests and past voting behavior.

The key to generating buzz, traffic and links from StumbleUpon is to make sure that your content is submitted and available to other StumbleUpon users. You may want to have other people submit your content so that you can vote positively on it and not come across to other StumbleUpon users as partial. The best type of content to submit to StumbleUpon is entertaining, informative or unique.

Micro-Blog With Twitter
A very powerful and increasingly popular way to communicate with friends and clients, build buzz and generate prospective business leads is through micro-blogging. Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows you to write brief text updates, usually less than 200 characters, and publish them--either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group of your choosing. Micro-blogging is a form of social networking that enables you to keep your followers up-to-date with what you are doing any time of day.

The most widely used micro-blogging network is Twitter. Twitter (twitter.com) is a free social networking service that allows you to micro-blog by sending short updates of 140 characters or less to others via a text message from your mobile phone, by typing a message from the Twitter site or by using instant messaging from Jabber or Google Talk.

Keep in mind that when you sign up for Twitter via the Twitter website, your communication settings are automatically set to "public." By keeping these settings public, your updates automatically go to both your friends and to the public timeline, which is automatically posted and updated for public viewing every four minutes. If you intend to use Twitter to build buzz about your business or generate traffic to your website, keep the public settings.

One of the ways you can use Twitter to generate website traffic and word of mouth is by sharing daily deals, special offers or exciting product news with your readers. If you have an e-commerce website, you may want to send out a message each morning announcing your top-selling products. For example, "Yesterday we sold over 1,000 red widgets. We have less than that left in inventory, so order now to guarantee shipment."

Write Search-Engine-Optimized Blog Posts
Writing search-engine-optimized blog posts is essential if you want your content to rank well with the leading search engines. You should familiarize yourself with how your blog software formats your content and make adjustments where necessary for search engine optimization purposes.

Use keyword research tools such as the Yahoo search suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com) to explore what your audience is searching for. The idea of using a keyword research tool is to identify keywords that you want to target within your blog's title, headlines and posts.

For example, if you are writing a post about a specific kind of acne treatment, you should perform keyword research around that broad topic and select 5 to 10 keywords to include throughout your post. All the keywords you select should be related to the topic of your post.

The primary topic of your post should be included in your title tag and within any post headlines. For example, if your post is about using Proactiv Solutions acne treatment, your title and any headlines should reflect just that. Your title tag should be something like "My Experiences Using Proactiv Solution." Any headlines should mention the phrase Proactiv Solution, e.g., "Using Proactiv Solution in Combination With Oil-free Lotion."

When linking to your blog post from other posts within your website, you should use keyword-rich anchor text. For example, if you've just written a post about the best types of soap to use on your face to prevent acne, you may want to link back to your acne treatment post with the anchor text "Proactiv Solution."

In general, you should selectively use bold or italic type to note your target keywords from the rest of the text. However, keep in mind that your post should ultimately be seen as natural to your readers and to the search engines. Do not simply stuff keywords where they do not belong. Instead, write keyword-rich, yet well constructed and compelling posts and make sure to highlight your most important keywords.

Kristopher Jones is president and CEO of Pepperjam, one of the country's fastest-growing Internet marketing agencies. He can be reached via e-mail at kris@pepperjam.com.