Here is a no-lose suggestion for improving your website. Before I tell you what it is, I want to go a step further and actually guarantee that what I am about to share with you will work.

The idea is brilliant in it’s simplicity, yet deceivingly difficult to execute. Carrying out the idea to it’s fullest potential requires discipline, persistence and a willingness to adjust your daily routine. In all likelihood, you are not currently doing what I am going to recommend that you do.

What I am proposing… assuring you will yield favorable results is to spend time each day reading through all sections of your company’s website. It doesn’t have to be a lot of time on a daily basis, and any time is better than no time, but I have never seen a site that is un-tweakable.

Areas of potential improvement include: content that could be more effectively written, organization of content that could be more intuitive, better calls to action than currently exist and let’s not forget, trying to stamp out those broken links.

I am as remiss as anybody in this regard. If we as an organization spent more time looking at MoreVisibility.com, somehow our site would incrementally improve at a faster rate.

There is, however one minor catch to this concept…as a result to the guarantee: it’s not enough to simply identify things that need to be fixed, but you need to actually fix them right away, so that you can move on to the next improvement. The more intelligent the original structure of the site and the more flexible the CMS that powers the site, the better the chance that you will be able to rapidly (and painlessly) implement changes and boost site performance.

I was in a meeting the other day with a company who was looking to retain our services. As we got deeper into the discussion, I learned that they were comparing us to other companies, some domestic and some off-shore. That’s fine and is an every day occurrence within our business.

What I found surprising was that several of the competitors were recommending techniques that we would unequivocally consider to be black hat SEO and making promises that were unrealistic. Their logic apparently was to take illicit measures that they felt would boost a client’s rankings in Google, even at the expense of damaging the credibility of their domain. Personally, I don’t think these businesses did an adequate job of explaining the risks involved, but rather sold the upside potential that these tactics may deliver.

I do not pretend to personally understand Google’s algorithm, but I am confident that the brainpower behind it is sufficient to continue to weed out techniques that are considered non-best practices, even if it doesn’t always happen overnight.

SEO should be an ongoing initiative within your organization. Shortcuts are not the answer. Don’t allow your site’s viability to be jeopardized by tactics that are very likely to backfire in the long run.