25 Search Engine Optimisation Tips

SEO (Search engine optimisation) is neither quick nor guaranteed, and anyone that tells you otherwise doesn’t have your best interests in mind. Nobody can guarantee you the first position in a search engine, for your most competitive keywords, but there are steps you can take to help things in the right direction.

1. START DOING SEO NOW! The longer you leave it, the more you have to catch up to your competitors, making it increasingly harder to rank higher than them.
2. Without SEO, search engines cannot categorise and rank your site for the keywords that are relevant to your website or business
3. You don’t need to tell search engines that you exist – they’ll find you – the days of submitting your site to engines are thankfully long behind us
4. Use the tools provided by search engines such as Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, to find out what keywords you currently receive traffic for, how much traffic you get, what pages are visited, etc.
5. Don’t take chances with Google penalties!  Don’t pay for backlinks, low quality links or any other form of “black hat” practices
6. You need to be using on-site and off-site SEO. Both work in tandem with each other, and help to improve your overall ranking
7. No 2 websites are the same. Something that worked for one site, isn’t guaranteed to work for yours since there’s so many different variables
8. Create a Google+ account for your business. This helps to build trust with Google and helps with localised search
9. Your website is never finished, and neither is the SEO on your site. You should be constantly adding new content to your website and improving it
10. SEO results don’t happen overnight. Work done today might not have an impact on your site for weeks or even months
11. Don’t copy content. Duplicate content can have a negative effect on your website so remove and duplicate pages and don’t copy from another website
12. Know your competitors. Find out what your competitors have done on-site and off-site, to help them to rank better, and improve on their efforts
13. Create content for people not search engines. Algorithms are intelligent enough to tell when a page has been stuffed with keywords in an effort to gain ranking. If a visitor doesn’t stay on your page for long then it’s generally a sign to search engines that the content isn’t good or interesting enough
14. Give every page a unique title and meta description that describes the topic of the page that encourages visitors to click on your site instead of a competitors
15. Use your blog to quickly add new content to your site. Content that people find useful or interesting encourages people to share it. Use charts or infographics to help emphasise content
16. Focus on one keyword for each page of your site, which makes it easier for search engines to categorise and rank the page
17. Use existing relationships to get backlinks for your site, such as suppliers, partners and customers
18. Internal linking – every page on your site should be linked to from at least one other page
19. Have links on your homepage to the most important pages on your site. This lets search engines know that these pages are important and helps to improve the ranking of these particular pages
20. Add social sharing buttons to your blog, making it easier for people to share your content
21. Remove unnecessary external links. Only send people away from your site, to other sites that they’ll find interesting or helpful
22. Add your site to local and industry directories.
23. Create a useful 404 error page. Provide an alternative to somebody that happens across a 404 error on your site so that they can find their way back to the site. Or use something funny to soften the blow!
24. All pages should have a heading, which summarises the content of the page, within a <H1> tag
25. The anchor text of a link should provide a description of the page it will link to and not use the classic READ MORE >>