100 SEO Tips For Small Businesses

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Adapt to algorithm updates. To attain and retain good rankings you need to adapt your SEO strategy as search engines evolve over time.

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.

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

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.

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.

Set-up and use Google Search Console. To find out, among other things, what keywords your site is ranking for and which other sites are linking to yours.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Write a unique, descriptive title for every page. Within 55 characters you need to make the topic of a page clear to both humans and search engines.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Avoid keyword stuffing. You’re much more likely to be penalised than credited if you use a keyword phrase repeatedly on a page.

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.

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.

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.

Get backlinks from trusted sources. Links from trustworthy sites signal to search engines that your site is trustworthy too.

Be prepared to work for high quality backlinks. Generally, the more easily you can acquire a link, the less value it will likely have.

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.

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.

Diversify your backlink profile. Get different types of links from a wide range of IP addresses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Know who’s linking to you. Within Google Search Console, go to ‘Traffic’ and then ‘Links’ to check how many sites are linking to yours and which sites they are.

Sign up for Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer. Doing so gives you access to extensive backlink data for your site and also your competitors’ sites.

Every page of your website should be linked to from at least one other page. Search engines don’t include pages in their results that aren’t linked to either internally (from another page of the same site) or externally (from another site).

Have direct links from your homepage to your most important pages. Doing so passes authority from the homepage to your important pages and improves the rankings of those pages.

Add in-content links to other relevant pages on your website. Whilst not as valuable as external links, internal links do still pass authority and signal to search engines what pages to rank for which keywords.

Remove unnecessary outbound links. Only link to pages on other sites that you think visitors to your site would find helpful and/or interesting.

Link out to relevant websites and blogs. People generally notice if you link to them, and if you link to them, there’s a reasonable chance that they’ll link back to you if you have good site.

Leave comments on relevant websites and blogs. Doing so builds trust and relationships with people – both the site owners and visitors to those sites.

Interact with bloggers in your industry. The better people with relevant blogs know you (through social sites, forums, email, etc.) the more likely they’ll be to link to your site and to share your content.

Contact small businesses with relevant websites. A good relationship, in which you help promote each others’ sites, makes SEO simpler and cheaper for you and for them.

Write press releases to share news and opinions. This is a good way to get content on, and links from, sites outside of your industry and circle of connections.

Phone people to develop online relationships. Emails can easily be ignored or forgotten, but phone calls not so much.

Use your website to build trust and relationships. The more relationships you have, and the more people trust you, the more people will talk about you, link to you, and, ultimately, buy from you.

Add your address and phone number to every page of your website. This builds trust and improves rankings if you’re targeting keyword phrases that contain your town/city name.

Get listed in industry and local directories. Most directories are worthless, however, there should be at least 10 that are relevant to your area or industry.

Ask customers to leave reviews on Google+ and local directories. Positive reviews improve your rankings in Google’s local listings and can be accessed directly from the search results.

Be personal in a way that big businesses can’t be. Putting your individuality and  personality across throughout the off-site SEO process (outreach emails, guest posts, Tweets, etc.) makes others more likely to engage with you.

Use social websites to promote other people’s content as well as your own. People generally know if you’ve taken action on social sites to help them, and if they see that you’ve helped them, the chances of them helping you out in return are much higher.

Add social sharing buttons to your website. The easier you make it for people to share your content, the more likely they will be to do so.

Social media isn’t a replacement for SEO. Your social strategy should be part of, or should run alongside, your SEO strategy.

Search engines ranks webpages, not websites. Whether or not a page ranks for a particular keyword depends largely on the quality of that individual page, and not the quality of your site as a whole.

Small businesses can rank higher than big businesses. It’s not uncommon for a page on a small business’s site to rank higher than a page on the site of a big, national company.

Know where you’re ranking. Within Google Search Console, go to ‘Traffic’ and then ‘Search Queries’ to check where your site is ranking for keywords.

Aim to be in the top 3, not just the top 10. If your site isn’t ranked in the top 3 positions for a keyword then you’ll only get a small percentage (less than 10%) of the traffic from searches for that keyword.

Rankings can be misleading. The number of 1st page rankings you have is irrelevant if those rankings don’t convert to visitor numbers and, ultimately, sales.

Don’t worry about PageRank. Sites with a low PR can, and often do, outrank sites with a high PR.

Choose between using www or not using www. Ensure that your site is set to load at either www.domainname.co.uk or domainname.co.uk – not both.

Adopt a flat website architecture. Any page of your site should be accessible within 3 clicks from your homepage.

Use a simple, clear URL structure. People should be able to guess the topic of a page by looking only at its URL.

Use header tags. Include variations of your target keyword phrases in a page’s H1 and H2 tags.

Use rich snippets. They provide additional data about your site to search engines and can improve the appearance of your site’s listing in search results.

Use 301 redirects. If you change the url of a page on your site, but don’t redirect the old url to the new one, any links pointing to the old one will be wasted.

Set-up a useful 404 error page. Linking to your best content from your 404 page means that visitors who see it are less likely to leave your site.

Optimise your images. Include a page’s target keyword phrase, or variations of it, in the file names and img alt tags of the images on that page.

Optimise your website for mobile users. Your site needs to be clear and simple to use for people accessing it using smartphones and tablets.

Check browser and screen resolution compatibility. Your site needs to render correctly in every web browser (Chrome, IE, Safari, etc.) and screen resolution (1366×768, 1024×768, 800×600, etc.).

Maximise your website’s loading speed. Use Google’s site speed tool and implement the recommendations that they give you.

Use a reliable web hosting company. Your site’s keyword rankings will be downgraded if your site is regularly inaccessible.

Regularly backup your website. If you lose your site data then you lose your rankings too, as search engines quickly remove sites that won’t load from their results.

Keep up-to-date with SEO news and trends. Read sites such as Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land and SEOmoz.

If you don’t know, ask someone. If you have a question, ask it in an online SEO forum or contact an SEO consultant.

Ask SEO consultants lots of questions. If you’re going to hire someone, you’ll be taking less of a risk if you know a lot about them and their strategies.

Engage with your SEO consultant. The more you know about SEO, and the more a consultant knows about your business, the better the results will be.

Source: http://www.seomark.co.uk/small-business-seo-tips/#ixzz4AMZaFz6K

55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

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2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written, and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for a site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new website you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Text around your links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity, and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

10 tips for an awesome seo blog post

Writing a blog post -like all other writing- is a skill. To keep your reader interested, you should think about structuring your text and writing in an appealing style. You can help your readers to grasp the main idea of your post by providing headings, subheadings and clear paragraphs. If people understand and like your text, they are much more inclined to share, like, tweet and link to your post. And that will increase your rankings! So, in order to improve your ranking in Google, you should definitely try to maximize your writing skills!

For some, writing for SEO purposes and writing to attract and keep attracting your audience could appear as two contradictory goals. I totally disagree with this. Indeed, if you not only want a good but also an SEO-friendly blog post, the words you want to be found on should be in a very prominent place. But, using your keywords too often severely damages the readability of your text. So, you definitely shouldn’t do that!

In this post, I would like to give some tips on writing blog posts that are both very readable as well as SEO-friendly. I genuinely think those two goals should (and easily can!) go hand in hand.

Elementary writing tips for good blog posts

Before anything, your blog post just has to be a good piece of writing! A lot of bloggers just begin to write when creating a new blog post. They just type what comes to mind. For some, this may be sufficient, because they are natural writing talents. Others might need some help. I always follow the next set of ‘rules’ myself.

1. Think before you write!

Think hard about the message of your text. What do you want to tell your readers? And what’s the purpose of your text? What do you want your readers to do at the end of the page? Write down the answers to these questions before you begin writing.

2. Write down the structure of your blog post.

Start your post with creating a clear structure. Every post should have some sort of introduction (in which you introduce your topic), a body (in which the main message is written) and a conclusion (which should summarize the most important ideas or deduce some new idea). Write down what you want to write in all these three sections. You now have a kind of summary of your post. The real writing can begin!

3. Use paragraphs.

Everybody uses paragraphs, but make sure to use paragraphs that make sense. Do not start a new sentence on a new line, just because it looks nice. There should be a reason for making a new paragraph. Every paragraph should have a main idea or a main subject. Ask yourself what the main idea of each paragraph is. You should be able to grasp that main idea in only one sentence. If you need more sentences, you simply need more paragraphs!

4. Use headings.

Headings structure the entire page, so you should use headings. They’re important for readability, but for SEO as well. Headings help Google to grasp the main topics of a long post and therefore can help in your ranking. If you want people to find their way in your articles, you should use subheadings. Subheadings will lead people, help them scan your page, and clarify the structure of your articles. Make sure you use your keywords in some subheadings. Not in each and everyone of them though, as it will make the text unreadable.

5. Use signal words.

Signal words help people to scan through your text and help people to grasp the main idea. Let’s say, for instance, that there are three reasons for people to buy your product. You should use signal words like: ‘first of all’; ‘secondly’ and ‘finally’. Also, words as ‘nevertheless’, ‘surely’ and ‘indeed’ give a clear signal to your readers. Readers will instantly get that a conclusion will follow after words like ‘consequently’, ’so’ or ‘for this reason’. Signal words are therefore very important to structure your text.

6. Let other people read your post.

Before publishing your post, let someone else read your post first. Ask him/her whether he understands the main idea of your post. Correct typos and sentences that aren’t formulated correctly.

7. Optimize the length of your article.

Make sure your articles have a minimum of 300 words. Google likes long articles, if your article is too long though it might scare away users. So try to stop at around 700 words. And, as a general rule of thumb: try to put your search terms in about 1 to 2 percent of your text. So in an article of 300 words, you should mention your search terms 3 to 6 times.

8. Link to previous content.

If you already wrote some content about the topic of your current post, don’t forget to link to these posts. It will make your post stronger because you show some authority on the subject. Next to that, your link structure is important for your ranking in Google as well. You should read Joost his post about cornerstone articles if you want to read more about this.

9. Add content regularly.

Adding actual and functional information to your website will give Google the idea that your website is alive. If it’s not an active website, Google will crawl it less often and it might become less appealing to Google to include the page in the search results.

10. Use our Yoast SEO plugin.

Our Yoast SEO plugin helps you write an SEO-friendly blog post. You start by choosing your focus keyword. This is the most important search term you want people to find this particular page for. Our plugin checks your post to see whether you use the keyword in the right places, and it measures many other aspects of the text. These are the most important ones:

• The plugin allows you to formulate a meta description.
• The plugin analyzes the text you write. It calculates a Flesch reading ease score, which indicates the readability of your article.
• It checks whether or not you used your keyword in 5 important locations: the article-heading, the title of the page, the URL of the page, the content of the article and the meta-description.
• The plugin also checks the presence of links in your article and the presence of images in the article.
• It calculates the number of words and the density of usage of the focus keyword in the article.
• Above that, the plugin also checks whether or not other pages on your website use the same focus keyword, to prevent you from competing with yourself.

If you write a relatively SEO-friendly blog post (based on the aspects mentioned before) the plugin will indicate this with a green bullet. Writing pages with green bullets will help you improve the ranking of the pages on your website.

Note that not every dot has to be green for the overall score to be “good”. For instance, these are the results of this post, which does have a “good” score:

If you’re not on WordPress, we also have this Page Analysis tool available on our site. It’s still in beta, so we’d love your feedback!

Looking for more optimization? Check out our Yoast SEO Premium plugin!

Conclusion

The era in which some SEO tricks were sufficient to get your website to rank high in Google has long ended. Nowadays, good content has the highest likelihood to result in a higher positions in Google. And good content also leads to more Facebook likes and shares, tweets and return visitors to your website. Of course, you can do some extra things to maximize the SEO friendliness of your post, but most important is: just write a very, very good post!

TOP 10 SEO Mistakes

The following are the top ten mistakes that I have seen made over and over again by people trying to self-optimize their websites.

Bad Titles

Titles are the most important thing about a webpage. Search engines spiders see the title on your page first and they make a general assessment about it based upon this. They scan the page and make sure the content of the page matches the title and then assign rankings based upon these matches and how they best fit. The title tag is the best way to inform the search engine what your page is about, and they play an important part in ranking if used properly. Placing your main identified keywords in the title and ensuring to obey the rule of leftward and stemming is vital - leftward rule, the closer the word to the left of the sentence the more important it is, stemming is where words can be associated but with words in-between i.e.: Great Blue Widgets when stemmed would allow Great Widgets. It is important to ensure your title matches your page content, description and Meta keywords and in unique for your website. Every page title and content should be unique otherwise is will be ranked supplemental.

Filename of the page

It is important if you are using dynamic websites like Joomla or other content management systems that a search engine friendly URL translator is installed. Because I use Joomla every day I will describe what I mean relating to Joomla. In Joomla (and most other dynamic websites) URL's like the normal Joomla URL "index.php?option=com_mtree&task=listcats&cat_id=1766&Itemid=35" drive the website. The problem with these URL's is that they are unintelligible by humans and also by search engines. Installing a search engine friendly URL component will change these pages to something more meaningful and also including your keywords in these page names can help with SEO. The newly transformed search engine friendly URL would look like this "buy-blue-widgets.html". If you do not have a dynamic website then ensuring your page name is short, to the point and contains your main keywords for that page maybe with a call to action like "buy" and "blue widgets".

Duplicate or Bad Content

Ensuring your content is unique and relevant is vital in SEO success. Often websites just duplicate content or bring in plagiarized content from other websites. It is my experience that these websites fail dismally in search engine rankings. Write some decent and unique content or maybe search online and find someone who can actually write you decent unique content for a fee. Make it good, friendly and unique content that people will want to link to. If you are listed in the supplemental index of Google then making sure you titles, descriptions, Meta keywords and on page content is unique is the only way to drag them out of the supplemental index.

No Links

Having covered off a few of the on page most important SEO tips we now look at links, which are an off page SEO concept. For each person or website that links to your website it is a vote for your site. If the website that links to yours has a high pagerank itself then it carries more weight. Simply having good keywords, titles and text on your page is only part of SEO. Just because you created a unique and perfectly optimized webpage does not mean you will automatically gain a decent pagerank for that page. In order to ensure SEO success you have to create incoming links - this is probably the hardest part of search engine optimization because you are effectively selling your pages all over the Internet. One way to gain instant (within a few weeks) links is to pay for text advertising - A search on Google will uncover some of the best text linking services. Link exchanges are bad because for every vote you get you are giving one away and if you happen to link to a "black listed" site then Google will penalize you significantly. One way links are the ultimate in SEO link campaigns so seek out directories (either paid or free, you need to evaluate), post in forums, write articles and submit them and ask other friendly webmasters if they can help you out with a link. The best way to gain links is to have unique content that other people actually want to link to.

Incoming link anchor text

Having pointed out how important it is to gain incoming links it is now important to also point out that the text those links are anchored to is important also. The text should be targeted at your main keywords and the page they point to should have those keywords as relevant and prominent also. The website you link from should be relevant to your website. So, as an example I own a web design company in Melbourne, Australia so I gain links from web hosting providers and/or open source Joomla sites in or around my region. Getting 1000 links from a casino related website will serve no benefit to my website and will not make it rank higher for "web design" keyword search terms. Use professional common sense when gaining links.

Bad Internal Page Links

We return to on page factors that you can work on within your website. It is important to make sure that the anchor text linking to pages within your own website is relevant to the target page. Make sure the title tag is filled in also for each link. You have the greatest control over links from within your own web site so make sure they are relevant and that link title and the on page copy match the main keywords of the target page.

Live links

Using some external tools like the link checker that W3 Org offer is good. I suggest harnessing as many tools as you can to ensure all of the links on your website are live, working and not sending people to 404 error pages. It is also important to check and make sure your page markup, or html, xhtml, is valid so W3 also offer a tool to check this. Make use of both of these freely available tools.

Impatience

Search Engine Optimization is not a short term task. It is one of an ongoing refinement after refinement and hour after hour of working on your website. Producing unique content, checking it, validating, listing and checking the search engines and making sure they have it listed correctly. Do not think for one second that you can optimize your site thoroughly ever and do not ever think that just because you are number one for a search term that it will indefinitely stay that way. Search Engine Companies are always changing their ranking and rating systems and coupled with this there are always other people out there gunning for your top spot. Keep looking to improve and learn more and don't sit back and wait for others to take your top spot, be proactive, seek out new content, links and keep ahead of the curve.

Keyword selection

This is proving to be a very common mistake among beginners to SEOSEO. Often people base their own keyword selection on what they *think* is right but is this what people actually search for when they are looking for your product or service? Often the answer to this questions is no. It is an important step to do the correct keyword research and ensure you have the right keyword list before you optimize any pages with them. Using Overture, Google Adwords and some other paid keyword tools like WordTracker (the default standard in Keyword Finding) are vital to success in finding good keywords. It is important to localize your target market and figure out what they are actually searching on when they are looking for products or services that you offer. Do the research and be as specific as possible while still being broad enough to capture some high keyword traffic.

Keyword Spamming and Stuffing

If you sell "Blue Widgets" then every page of your site does not need to have "Blue Widgets" in the title, description and Meta tags. Try and be objective and analyze you website. Focus pages on a specific group of keywords you have identified from the keyword list. Sometimes finding niche markets locally first can be best. So, as an example, "Buy Blue Widgets Australia" or "Buy Blue Widgets Melbourne". These would be examples of good second or even third tier search keyword phrases but you can make some good sales with these niche terms because the searcher is targeting buying these items.