Top 5 SEO tips

SEO is a hot topic, has been for a long time and there are many suggestions on the best SEO techniques, weather your a web developer, SEO consultant or a business owner, the following 5 tips can be used to plan or optimise your website.

1. Content
2. Links (incoming, internal & Page rank)
3. URL's (title and navigation)
4. Tags - meta, alt and H tags
5. Clean Code - HTML
6. Statistics - Webmaster and Analytics

The eagle eyed will have spotted 6 points above, and the title is 5 SEO tips - well number 6 isn't really an SEO tip, but an essential part to measuring your success.

1 - Content

There's a saying with websites and SEO - Content is King - this is the all important number one tip, get your content right, it can sometimes be challenging to write content for certain websites, and another danger is that the content becomes to long, in-depth or even waffles and this detracts from your main sales message. I personally believe that a website will always benefit from as much quality content as possible, but don't force it on your visitors, or make them trawl through masses of content, a clear logical navigation system should allow them and the search engine spiders to find your content if desired. The manner in which your content is written is important as well, quite often people try to force home their keyword and this can make the copy unreadable, it is important to have a planned keyword/phrase that runs through the site, but remember ultimately your target audience is your customers not the search engines and the goal of a search engine is to deliver the best content to its user when conducting a search, so good content will be rewarded. You will also be rewarded if you regularly add content, I appreciate that this can be tricky and some would say it is one of the reason behind many companies blogging as it allows you to quickly add content relevant to your business, but generally larger websites are more successful than smaller ones - ever found the answer to your search (the top result) on a 3 page website?

2-Links (incoming, internal & Page rank)

The second rule for successful SEO is linking, incoming links are hugely influential on search engine results, Google openly said that it treats a link from one site to another as a vote from one site for the other. So incoming links are going to help boost your website and incoming links from websites with a good page ranking will provide an even bigger boost. The text used in the link is also important, an ideal incoming link would come from a site with a high google page rank and would contain the keyword of your website which is also the keyword of the page it was linking too, not an easy task, but worth the effort. But a word of warning, don't go out there and get as many links as you possibly can as in my opinion some can have a negative impact, make sure that the link source is a respectable website and not a link farm and better still is relevant to your business or industry - I always use the wedding industry as an ideal example, there are many parts to the wedding industry and not all compete directly with each other, so if a group of businesses which all provide services to weddings came together and link to each other they would all benefit, the dress maker, the wedding cake maker, the car hire company, the venue etc etc The other part of linking is internal links, that is links within your website, one of my pet hates is the basic 'click here' link - if you search for 'click here' in google Adobe comes out on top as the classic link is 'click here' to download adobe reader. When you provide a link within your website you have made it clear where that link will take the user if followed, so make it more clear and get some bonus points from search engines by including the keyword,

Click here for SEO tips isn't as good as Click here for SEO tips

Its a very simple difference but one that will gain you additional points in the SEO race. Remember use your keyword in your link (that is the keyword of the destination page) and in the url as discussed in point 3.

3-URLs (Title and Navigation)

Another simple but important tip is to use your keyword in the url, if your page is focused around seo then name it seo.html or search-engine-optimisation.html, it helps to reaffirm the focus of the page, the keyword that it is based around, if we consider point 2 above and combine it with point 3 a hyperlink from a page which features seo and that then links to a page which includes seo in the url, well hopefully it is clear that this is much better than a 'click here' link to webpage7. The age of a URL is also recognised, it is believed to gain authority over its life time and will contribute towards achieving good rankings, unfortunately unless your lucky enough to purchase a domain with authority this is something that simply takes time and patience, I have heard stories of urls with high authority being sold for thousands of pounds, but unless it was essential to your business I personally believe that there is a lot more you could do with that money.

4-Tags - meta, alt and H tags

There was a time when web developers loaded these with keywords and some even used fake keywords which meant that search engines returned inaccurate results, so the search engines decided not to use tags, but in time they have began to include them when ranking a website. The important part of SEO is to have a keyword running through the site, from the link which brings you to the site, through the content, within the url and within the tags, the meta tags are the title tag (the tag which appears at the very top of the browser) the meta description tag, this is often a snap shot of the page and can appear as the short descriptive paragraph when search engines return results and the meta keywords, which as simply the keywords relating to the page, I believe that you should put these in order of most important to least important. The alt tags relate to images, these are the alternative tags for when an image doesn't appear or the descriptive tags for screen readers, I would recommend that again the image relate to the page content and so the alt tag will also relate to the page content as it will describe the image and its relevance to the page, a bonus tip here is to give the image an appropriate name, seo-technique-1.gif is better than untitledimage1.gif right? The H tags are the Header tags, these will usually be a title or header to a page introducing the content and again will likely have the keyword within it, it is believed that Search Engines give content within H tags a slightly higher rating or score than the rest of the body.

5-Clean Code - HTML

The final tip is to keep your code as clean as possible, I know that as a web developer sometimes code can become messy or cluttered when using some java scripts to achieve a visual effect, this is a choice between delivering the cleanest code possible but at the sacrifice of user experience or providing a more impressive and pleasing user experience at the expense of clean code. But if you can always bear in mind that the cleaner your code is the more apparent your keyword will be and hopefully the more successful your website will be.

6-Statistics - Webmaster and Analytics

This isn't really a SEO tip but is essential, if you implement all the above advice on your website then I know you will get improved results, but how will you see them or measure them, I'm sure you will hopefully have an increase in enquiries or sales, but hard figures are always good to review. I'm a big fan of Google and install the webmaster tool and analytics on all my websites, both tools allows me and my clients to view the keywords and position obtained when searches are conducted. They also provide you with information on your incoming links, which pages are linked to, which pages are viewed and so much more. This really is an essential part of any website as it allows you to easily asses how your website is performing.