SEO TIPS AND TRICKS

1. No SEO means no visitors from search engines. If
you don’t do it then search engines can’t
categorise and rank your site for keywords relevant
to your business.
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 competitors 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 evolve over time.
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. You’re ultimately responsible for all of SEO work
done on your website. Search engines won’t
remove a penalty on the basis that you didn’t do,
and didn’t know the specifics of, the SEO work on
your site.
15. Set-up and use Google Webmaster Tools. To find
out, among other things, what keywords your site
is ranking for and which other sites are linking to
yours.
16. 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.
17. Set-up a Google+ page for your business. Doing so
builds trust with Google and improves rankings for
localised keywords.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. 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.
21. 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.
22. Remove duplicate content. You can be penalised
for having the same, or very similar, content on
multiple pages of your site.
23. 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.
24. Don’t copy content from other websites . If search
engines find that content on your site has been
taken from elsewhere they may downgrade rankings
for some, or even all, of your webpages.
25. Claim authorship of your content. Linking your
Google+ account to your content improves both
rankings and click-through-rate.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. 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.
29. Create stats/charts/graphs/infographics. People
are more likely to share and link to these types of
content than plain written content.
30. 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.
31. Add a blog to your website. Doing so makes it
quick and simple to add new pages of content to
your site.
32. 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.
33. 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.
34. 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.
35. 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.
36. 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.
37. Use Google’s Keyword Tool. It provides a good list
of words and phrases related to the keyword ideas
that you enter into it.
38. 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.
39. 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.
40. Target keywords with commercial intent. You want
visitors who are ready to spend money rather than
those who are just looking for information.
41. 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.
42. Dedicate 1 page of your website to each keyword
that you’re targeting. Doing so makes it simpler for
search engines to categorise and rank your pages.
43. Add keywords in the right places . They’re less
important than they used to be, but you should
still include them in urls, page titles, meta
descriptions, header tags and image alt tags.
44. Avoid keyword stuffing. You’re much more likely to
be penalised than credited if you use a keyword
phrase repeatedly on a page.
45. Backlinks affect rankings more than anything else.
The number and quality of links pointing to your
site will largely determine in what position your
site ranks.
46. Don’t set backlink targets . Link building should be
a steady, consistent, on-going process, that
doesn’t stop when you reach a certain number.
47. Get backlinks from relevant sources. Search
engines want to display relevant results for each
keyword, and links from relevant pages/sites are a
strong signal to them that your site is relevant.
48. Get backlinks from trusted sources. Links from
trustworthy sites signal to search engines that your
site is trustworthy too.
49. Be prepared to work for high quality backlinks.
Generally, the more easily you can acquire a link,
the less value it will likely have.
50. Be wary of paying people to link to your website .
Buying backlinks can, and does work, however,
there’s a definite risk involved if you buy cheap
ones and/or from people who openly sell them.
51. Don’t get involved in link networks. The benefit of
getting links from networks is low, whereas the
risk of being penalised and losing rankings is high.
52. Diversify your backlink profile. Get different types
of links from a wide range of IP addresses.
53. Build backlinks to every page of your website that
you want to rank. Get people to link to the inner-
pages of your site – the ones you want to rank for
specific keywords – as well as to the homepage.
54. Existing relationships are an instant source of
backlinks. Some of your suppliers, partners and
customers will link to your site if you ask them to
do so.
55. Get the good backlinks that your competition
already has. If someone has already linked to one
of your competitors then there’s a reasonable
chance that they’ll link to you also if you give
them a good reason to.
56. Get some backlinks with your target keywords as
the link text. This type of link is important, but
should make up less than 25% of your backlink
profile.
57. The majority of your backlinks should be branded.
A backlink profile without lots of branded links
(like ‘Company Name’ and
‘www.companyname.co.uk’) signals to search
engines that you’ve been using manipulative link
building tactics.
58. Know who’s linking to you. Within Google
Webmaster Tools, go to ’Traffic’ and then ‘Links’ to
check how many sites are linking to yours and
which sites they are.