Everybody has their own opinions on SEO, I suppose in some ways it is more of an art than a science. These are a few of the things I do to optimise for traffic.
Attack The Most Popular Keywords
When deciding what to optimise a web page for have a long hard think about what you would type into a search engine in the hope of finding that content. The chances are that’s what most other people would type as well. Use that as a starting point for your keyword research and do not be afraid to optimise for the most popular search. Now this probably goes against what every other person in this field has ever said but I don’t care. The fact is I’ve sold as many villas to people searching for “spanish villas” as “luxury spanish villas for sale”. It’s easier to rank for the second one but even a top 30 position in the first generates more traffic than a number 1 spot for the second. This doesn’t mean that you ignore other search phrases it just means that you concentrate on the most popular search. The search engines are getting very clever, write enough content and you’ll soon start appearing for related searches as well.
The Importance Of Regular Updates
You must constantly update your websites. You must constantly update your websites. You must constantly update your websites. Enough said? OK I’ll explain a little more. When you first create new content it is easy to rank well. After a few weeks you will see new pages start to appear in the search results, they stay for a while and then they all start to slip. This happens to us all. In order to avoid this general ranking slippage you must update your website, tell the search engines that your website is active and up to date. You don’t even have to write about anything in particular. If you have a latest news page update that, start writing articles that you can post every few weeks. This really does matter, I’ve seen clients websites go from number one to nowhere over 6 months because they think that once a website is live then that’s the end of the story. It’s a question I’ve been asked numerous times in the past, “We started of with 10 enquiries in the first month but now nothing?”. My question is always the same, have you updated your website since it was first created? You want to know why the search engines love blogs, it’s not because people spend hours writing highly optimised search specific content, it’s because of regular updates and a constant stream of new original content for them to digest. They love it!
What Really Matters On Your Page
There are so many on-the-page factors that influence where your page will appear in the search results. Different search engines have different algorithms but when I’m optimising a page these are what I consider to be the essentials.
URL – Include your primary search phrase in either the domain name or the name of your page. I’m quite fond of renaming my index.* file to something like my-main-search.* and making that my default page.
Title – Recently voted as still being one of the most important elements a good title helps rank and provides the search results with something to link to. A good title makes your page much more likely to be picked out of the SERPS on show. I keep my titles short (less than 12 words) and try and get my main phrase in first or as close to the start as possible whilst still making it readable.
H Tags – Header tags are very important. On my own sites I prefer 1 H1 and up to 2 H2 tags. Be careful though, too much content in headers compared to the main body of text looks like search engine spamming and can be penalised. The best way to avoid this is to write lots of original content to bulk out your pages (yeah, like it’s that easy)!
Meta Description And Keywords – Now this is only my own opinion but I still do like to use these. Not that Google gives a damn but for Yahoo and MSN search. Both of these search engines can still deliver nice amounts of traffic and as far as I’m aware they both still put some weight on your description and keyword tags.
There are of course many other on-the-page elements that’s are taken into account not to mention your link structure but over the years these are the ones that I’ve found to be most important. Or put it another way, getting these wrong will definitely hurt your ranking.
2 Responses to “My Own Favourite SEO Tips”
Petra Weiss
August 22, 2009
Well, I have a website http://www.healthydietweightloss.com which was on page 1 of the Google SERP’s for the last 3 weeks or so, for the search term “healthy diet weight loss” – which gets 22000 searches a month. And I had optimized my site pretty much in the way you describe for that keyword. But guess what – overnight, I have disappeared! Huh? Can it be that Google has decided to just do it’s famous “Google dance”? I have not updated the blog for about 10 days, but that’s not long enough for Google to decide to take me off the radar yet, is it? Mpfh, I am pretty disappointed…
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