seo top tips

1.      No SEO means no visitors from search engines. If you don’t do SEO then search engines can’t categorise and rank your site’s pages.

2.      Both on-site SEO and off-site SEO are required. You can’t achieve good results doing one without the other.

3.      Start doing SEO now. The longer you leave it to start, the further ahead your competition will be, and the harder it becomes to rank higher than them.

4.      Know your competition. Find out what the sites ranking on the 1st page for the keywords that you want to rank for have done, on-site and off-site, to get there.

5.      No two websites are the same. An SEO strategy that worked for someone else’s site isn’t guaranteed to work for yours because there are so many variables.

6.      SEO doesn’t have to be expensive. You can get big results on a small budget if you invest time in creating good content and building online relationships.

7.      SEO results aren’t instant. The results of SEO work done today might not become apparent, and might not be credited by search engines, for weeks, or even months.

8.      The newer your website is, the more patient you will need to be. It takes time to build authority and trust, and until you’ve developed both, you shouldn’t expect to outrank older, more established sites.

9.      Never consider your website to be finished. If you want your site to continue to rank higher, attract more visitors and make more sales, then you should always be adding to and improving it.

10.  Adapt to algorithm updates. To attain and retain good rankings you need to adapt your SEO strategy as search engines change and improve.

11.  You don’t need to submit your website to search engines. They have evolved beyond the point of needing to be directly notified when a new website, or page on a website, is created.

12.  Get advice directly from Google. Via their Webmaster Guidelines and Webmaster Help Videos.

13.  Don’t risk Google penalties. As they have a significant share of the search market, a penalty from them results in a significant, and often long-term, loss of visitors to your site.

14.  Set-up and use Google Webmaster Tools. This allows Google to notify you of problems that they may find when they’re crawling your site.

15.  Set-up and use Google Analytics. To find out, among other things, how many visitors your site gets, the keywords they use to find it, and what pages they visit.

16.  Set-up a Google+ page for your business. Doing so builds trust with Google and improves rankings for localised keywords.

17.  Diversify your traffic sources. Google is a great source of traffic but being 100% reliant on them for visitors puts you in a vulnerable position.

18.  Use Pay Per Click in addition to SEO. If you can afford to do both, then do both, as although PPC can be costly, you can get visitors to your site straight away for any keywords that you want.

19.  Low quality equals high risk. Low quality backlinks and/or low quality on-site content can easily result in your site being penalised by search engines.

20.  Create content primarily for people, not search engines. There’s no point creating content that ranks well if it doesn’t help people, interest them, or persuade them to buy from you.

21.  Remove duplicate content. You can be penalised for having the same, or very similar, content on multiple pages of your site.

22.  Remove, merge or add to pages with little content on them. Having lots of content-light pages, with short page view times, can result in search engines downgrading all of your site’s keyword rankings.

23.  Don’t copy content from other websites. If search engines find that content on your site has been taken from elsewhere they will downgrade rankings for the pages with the copied content on them or completely remove those pages from their results.

24.  Claim authorship of your content. Linking your Google+ account to your content improves both rankings and click-through-rate.

25.  Ensure your content is good enough to be on the 1st page. If your content isn’t better than the content already on the 1st page for a keyword then your site doesn’t deserve to rank there.

26.  Make your content engaging for visitors. The more engaging it is, the longer people will stay on your site, and high viewing times signal to search engines that your site deserves good rankings.

27.  Create videos. They increase the amount of time that people spend on your site and also allow you to get links from video sharing sites.

28.  Create stats/charts/graphs/infographics. People are more likely to share and link to these types of content than to plain written content.

29.  More content equals more rankings, more visitors and more sales. Search engines reward, and visitors trust more, sites that are filled with lots of pages of good quality content.

30.  Add a blog to your website. Doing so makes it quick and simple to add new pages of content.

31.  Create content to post on other websites and blogs. People are much more likely to link to you if you provide them with content to use on their site.

32.  Balance creating content with marketing content. If you create content without marketing it then people will struggle to find it, and if they can’t find it they can’t link to it or share it.

33.  Write a unique, descriptive title for every page. Within 65 characters you need to make the topic of a page clear to both humans and search engines.

34.  Write a unique, descriptive meta description for every page. Within 160 characters you need to describe the topic of a page in a way that persuades people to click on your site instead of the other sites listed in the search results.

35.  Research keywords before optimising for them. If you choose the wrong keywords, regardless of what you do for on-site and off-site SEO, you’ll get very few visitors and/or visitors who don’t convert into sales.

36.  Use Google’s Keyword Tool. It provides a good list of words and phrases related to the keyword ideas that you enter into it.

37.  Get keyword ideas from other people. They (customers, suppliers, partners, friends, etc.) see your business differently to you and may associate different words and phrases with it.

38.  Target relevant keywords. The more relevant your keywords are, the easier and quicker it is to rank for them, and the higher the percentage of visitors who will become buyers.

39.  Target keywords with commercial intent. You want visitors who are ready to spend money rather than those who are just looking for information.

40.  Long-tail keywords are a great source of traffic. It’s quicker and cheaper to rank for longer, specific keyword phrases, and more than 40% of searches are comprised of four or more words.