A recent article from Entrepreneur.com lists some of the most basic, yet critical steps to protect your business’s search engine rankings. These are simple changes to your sites and pages, but they’re also critical not to overlook. Check out these “6 Steps to Take Today to Improve Your Google Search Results” and see if you’ve overlooked any:

1. Make sure your business’ name is in the domain name. Also, make sure that the name appears on the homepage, in words, not just the logo or other graphics. Search engines can’t read images.
2. Mention your business’ name on the “About Us” page. Listing the business name along with a description of what you do makes it easy for search engines to associate you with searches for the services and products you provide.
3. Put the business’ name on the “Contact Us” page. Again, make sure the name is present in text, and don’t hide the contact info. Make a specific page for it to ensure that search engines will display the info right away when people are searching specifically for your business.
4. Update the backend. Make sure you’re using a sitemap plugin to “tell” search engines about the pages on your site that it might not automatically identify. The Entrepreneur.com article suggests Google XML Sitemaps for WordPress users, or else your web person or company can develop one for you.
5. Find the Google Places/Google Plus Local Listing for your business. Don’t forget to claim your page and ensure that the contact information is listed the same as on your website.
6. Now move on to the Facebook Page for the business. Don’t forget to change the username (URL) of your page to the business name that you are trying to optimize.

Click here for the article from Entrepreneur.com.