Sadly there's no quick fix when it comes to SEO. If you're hoping that you can get your site live and you'll have a massive influx of traffic straight away you're going to be disappointed. It's a process that takes some time and effort, but it's well worth it if you want your site to be successful.
SEO done well will not only increase your search rankings, it also improves
your entire website for your visitors.
So let's have a look at our top 10 tips that will improve your SEO campaign
1. Content is king.
Regarless of everything else you have going on on your site and the other SEO tips you should follow, your content should be the single most important aspect you focus on. If you have content that is poorly written, doesn't offer anything of value to your readers and is simply there to be stuffed with keywords in a vain attempt to boost your rankings, you're not going to get the visitors you want.
Good content, on the other hand, will be something that your visitors will enjoy reading, will be shared by others
(often on their own websites) and will turn a one-off visitor into a subscriber and regular reader/customer.
You need to make your content informative, as unique as possible, and give them the most up to date information. Make it funny or witty, get your own voice and opinions in your content and your visitors will feel like they are getting something more personal out of it.
You want to get your keywords into your content, sure, but if your content is well written and tailored to your niche, this should come easily and blend well. Don't stuff keywords in there just for the sake of it as it won't
read well and will be painfully obvious to your visitors.
2. Choose your keywords wisely.
Keywords are essential for SEO and although you don't want to over do it, you need them in order to bring someone from Google to your site. You should always try to be as straight forward and specific as possible when deciding what keywords to target. It's better to target keywords that will reduce the general traffic to your site and
instead bring in your ideal customer who knows that by clicking through to your site they'll find exactly what they were searching for.
You should always do tons of keyword research. Use as many keyword tools as you can to get a good idea of what you want and you'll want to think outside the box too. Think about your ideal customer. What would they type into Google to come across my site? Will they be asking a question that they want the answer to? Are
they searching for a specific product. Keep this in mind when choosing your keywords and phrases.
3. Good page-to-page connectivity.
A well-designed site will funnels users from page to page effortlessly. By interlinking your site so that relevant
pages connect to each another, you’ll find that even the less visited branches of your website will see more traffic.
As a result, you can expect your website to have better domain authority and, as a result, a higher ranking.
In other words, as many pages as possible should be connected to each other with text-based hyperlinks. Pay particular attention to creating connections between your main pages and your homepage.
4. Avoid Flash and text based images.
The search spiders that index websites only read text on websites and are incapable of analyzing Flash or
image files. So, in general, stay away from both as content mediums. Don't use Flash-based navigation and stay away from creating content text that is in image form. Image-based text may contain useful information and keywords but it will be invisible to the search engine spiders.
5. Tags, Meta Descriptions and Alt tags
Create informative meta descriptions of all your Web pages with the keywords for that page appearing in the description; you'll have 150-160 characters to fill. These meta descriptions are likely not use by Google any more for ranking, but they're useful in attracting attention from human readers in the search results page, so use them anyway.
Include title tags for EVERY important page of your site. You get 70 characters for this and should give a quick description of the individual page they represent (with at least one or two page relevant keywords).
More often than not you'll have content-relevant images on your site. Image search features on Google and other engines will bring these up in image searches for your keywords. However, search spiders can't analyse images if
related text is not included. You need to create description tags for each image you post and they should give a quick description of what the image is of or what it relates to in your content.
6. Building links
Getting backlinks to your site from other websites is essential. If you want to build external links without resorting #to black hat tactics (that will get you penalized or banned), you're going to have to spend a hefty chunk of time posting links to social sites, finding guest post opportunities and leaving comments on other websites in your niche. Try to ensure that those links are not "nofollow." Links with a nofollow attribute are ignored by search spiders as a valid backlink. You can still get visitors as a result of those links because people will click on them and end p on your site.). Building up backlinks is a slow process, but it does pay off in the long run.
7. Social Media
If you haven't already got your business on the many social media sites out there, get on it as soon as possible.
Create accounts on Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn. Social media is an extrememly popular and effective way to generate long term website traffic. As the number of people following and sharing your content on these sites increases, so will the potential customers that will frequent your site.
8. Make sure your site’s performing well.
You're going to lose out if you have a site that loads super slow. Slow loading times are frustrating. Optimize your photos and watch the number and types of plugins that you use. They can slow you site down, visitors will ghet fed up of rating and this is going to hit your bounce rate.Your bounce refers to how many visitors come
to your site and leave pretty quickly. Your bounce rate will hinder your rankings as search engines take this into account and assume that your content is poor and you're providing a poor user experience.
9. It's an on-going process.
You can't put in a lot of effort for a few weeks and then kick back and relax. You need to be carrying out SEO on a regular basis. Constantly building backlinks, building up your regular visitors through social media and updating your content regularly. This doesn't mean that you have to spend hours every day on it, but work it in to a routine where you do a little bit but often. You have to remember that your competition will be doing it too so if you get lax, your competition will start to rank better than you.
10. Have patience.
Keep your expectations realistic. SEO can dramatically improve your site traffic and search engine rankings, but they do take time. After having built up momentum your website’s analytics will rise sharply. However, getting there may sometimes take a month or two. Keep this in mind throughout the duration of your new SEO campaign as if you forget this it can make your SEO efforts seem futile and you'll give up before you start to see the results.