SEO

Top 10 SEO Tips

1. Competitor Analysis – what are your online competitors doing right online, what are they doing wrong? Can you see elements that you may wish to include on your site?
2. Create a simple structure – Well designed websites are not only beneficial to your visitors, they’re beneficial to the search engines too, the easier the site is to navigate around, the easier the search engine bots can index it in search of new content or links. Make sure when you are wire framing the site that you include contingency plans for new pages that may be added further down the line.
3. Keyword Analysis – This cannot be overstated enough, before starting work on the content of your site it’s worth spending some serious time researching what keyword phrases your perspective visitors are using when searching for your product. You may think you know how people are searching but it’s worth using some of the free tools that the internet has to offer to ensure that both you and your visitors are on the same wavelength. My favourite is the free Keyword Suggestion tool from SEOBook, not only will it show you how many people search for any particular keyword phrase on all the major search engines each day but it’ll also suggest other similar search terms that you may wish to target.
4. Keyword Density – You now got to take that keyword research and implement it throughout your site, in days gone by there was almost a stone cold equation for how often you should use the same keyword phrases throughout a site with overdoing it and being labeled spam, alas those days have passed. Now we must rely more on common sense. Most will agree that using a chosen keyword phrase more than 3 times in body copy of around 250 words is entering a dangerous area.
You must always try to remember however, that whatever you do and whatever you write must make sense to human beings.
5. Header tags, h1 – h6 – these are the code used for creating headers on your page, I wont go into detail about them (for more info see my html coding section) but I will say this, they serve two excellent purposes, 1. Search engines view the copy as higher importance than normal text and 2. They’re people friendly, so include your keywords in your headers, that way they’ll rank better and people scanning for information on your pages will be able to find it fast and efficiently.
6. Page titles – similar to the reasons above, your page title is the line of copy that appears at the top of your browser’s window, search engines treat it as very important and so should you, it acts as a great indicator for what is on your page so use it wisely. Another factor is that search engines will use it as the title for your page in its results, if it’s not people friendly, then its not getting as many clicks as it could be.
7. Meta Keywords, Description & Image Alt tags – The meta description can be found in the page head, search engines often use it as the description of your page under the page title in their results, so much like the page title it should make for easy reading for humans. To balance that you should also wish to try to include a keyword phrase or two within the 120 odd characters as the search engines will deem your description as a good indicator of how relevant you are to your chosen keywords.
Meta keywords certainly don’t hold as much clout as they used to in the past, as a result many SEO’s no longer use them, I don however, mainly due to a ‘what harm can it do?’ philosophy. If you wish to include a set of keywords in the meta tags of your page head, try to ensure that each page’s lists are unique.
Search Engines can’t see your images so its up you to tell them what those images are, including alt tags with every image does not just make SEO sense but is also just plain valid coding.
8. Links – Links are, contrary to many people’s opinions, still very relevant in today’s search world, think of each incoming link as a vote, if you have 500 incoming links from relevant sites all with anchor text saying “beautiful bunny rabbits’ or something similar, then the search engines will understandably decide that your peers have made it clear that your site is both important and relevant to those keywords and as a results you should start to see your rankings climbing. Be careful when collecting links, try to make sure that they are relevant to your industry and that they are above board websites, being affiliated with a website that is seen in the search engines eyes as unsavoury can have damaging affects on your site.
9. Analytics – In this day of google giving us everything for free there is no longer any reason why everyone shouldn’t be tracking their statistics. Analytics can tell you which pages are more successful with your visitors than others, they can give you insights into how your visitor’s brain is working and how they are navigating through your site. If you can get inside the mind of your visitors then you may be able to see issues and make corrections that you would never have thought about otherwise.
10. You must understand that SEO isn’t a job that just finishes after 6 months and you can sit back and put your feet up. An SEO’s job is never done, there are always improvements to be made, statistics to be analysed, tweaks here, there and everywhere. People evolve, visitors trends change and as they do you must be prepared to change with them, or your competition will.