Top SEO Tips That Really Work

A successful SEO campaign needs to consist of both on page and off page work. Here are our top tips that really work to help boost your website’s rankings.

Choose your keywords carefully

You need to plan ahead with SEO. Think about what you want to achieve within a certain time frame and then think about how you’re going to get there. When choosing your keywords, it may be tempting to go for broad, short-tail keywords such as ‘Office Supplies’, but you will also need to target more specific, long-tail keywords such as ‘Office Supplies London’. The traffic will be quite a bit lower for long-tail keywords but your conversion rate on these keywords is likely to be much higher. Within your plan, it is normally best to target long-tail keywords first and then move onto the short-tail keywords once your rankings show significant improvement.

Link to and from sites with a high page rank

With link building, Google rate quality over quantity. A website filled with hundreds of ads and low quality links will get you nowhere fast so choose your link partners carefully. You can download a page rank tool for Firefox which shows you the rank of the page you are viewing; this will come in useful when contacting sites for link exchanges as you will want to target those that have a decent rank. Many sites will only exchange links with you if you have a certain page rank or higher. It is also important to note that the link must be ‘natural’, for example, if you sell office supplies, it is no good linking to a website about plants as they have no connection or relevance to each other. Google will spot that this link is not natural, assume that you have paid for it, and it will not be counted.

Use your keywords wisely

The trick with keywords is to not over-do it. It is important to show them within the Meta titles, Meta descriptions and copy; but there are best practices that should definitely be adhered to. Don’t stuff your site with keywords; they should appear naturally in sentences and should make up a maximum of approximately 5% of your total word count. Also, you should use them for anchor text links within your copy but keep these to a maximum of 3 per page. Footer links no longer hold very high value for Google so do not stuff the footer area with internal keyword links as this may actually end up having a detrimental effect. You also need to keep any eye out for duplication within your copy, titles and descriptions; this is one of the fastest ways to get your site thrown off the first SERP so avoid it at all costs!