How To Tackle SEO

SEO is critical in todays market place and can be expensive to outsource, with this in mind I've put together a list of what you should and shouldn't do to improve your SEO and ultimately gain more business, I hope the article helps and as always any questions my email is on the bottom of the article.

On-site SEO
Things to stop working on

• Putting a list of keywords in the page title instead of making it descriptive or using your brand name
• Jamming Keywords into the Meta Description instead of making it a call-to-action. The Meta Description is not used for ranking. Its only benefit is that it displays below your link in the search results. This shouldn’t be surprising, but to some it is.
• Using meta keywords. These have been useless for quite some time. they serve no purpose whatsoever. It is still good practice to include a meta-keyword here or there for certain tools that may still use them, but the search engines don’t.
• Including your primary keywords in H1 tags and secondary keywords in H2, H3 and so on. Fit keywords into these tags if it makes sense, but don’t waste time trying to get them into every single page or especially every single subtitle. You should almost never plug a keyword directly into these tags without additional words for context and shareability.
• Keywords in the alt tags of images. Use a descriptive alt tag or none at al.
• Keyword-rich URL naming conversations. If your URL is a bunch of junky letters and numbers this really doesn’t matter anymore.
• Cloaking. Just don’t do it. If a page is optimized for today’s search engines, it should already look very nice for a human.
• Stuffing keywords or using a specific “density” of keywords. Like the Meta Description, this has already been useless for many years. Just write about the keyword and you should be on the right track.
• Low quality, poor, or duplicate content on your site.
• Repeating navigational links in both the header and the footer.
• Excessive internal linking using the keywords as the anchor text.
• Updating your blog with ZERO value content.
• Building a website for search engines; not for users.

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Things to focus on

• SEO Friendly Website Architecture – Use all the new mark-up that is available to make your listings in the search result stand out like relauthor, schema.org and so on.
• Use descriptive titles that consider branding and shareability. When a user sees your title they should be excited and want to click on it because it sounds interesting, not because they notice it has the same keyword that they typed.
• Use a call-to-action in your meta description with close to no focus on keywords. Just as with the title, the meta description should be exciting and compel the reader to click though and find out more.
• Write content for users; not for search engines, this should be a no-brainer at this point, the pages you build should be designed to solve the specific problem the users were searching for.
• Consider UI, UX and Accessibility as primary aspects when building your website and your pages.
• Use calls-to-action and make it easier for visitors to connect with you. Focus on boosting your conversion rate.
• Lower page loading time.
• Use social badges so users can share your website socially and easily.
• Update your blog with content that should sound fresh, useful and unique. Visitors should love to share with others.
• Use legitimate elements on the website – real address, phone number and featured badges which make your visitor understand your business presence and legitimacy.
• Put real case studies, customers’ experiences, and video testimonials which help convert more visitors into customers and eventually help decrease the bounce rate.

Off-Site SEO: (Link Building)
Things to stop working on

• Unrecognised Free Directories (Use ones like Yell.com instead)
• Low Quality Social Booking Marking Websites
• Free Articles Directories (use relevant blogs)
• Link exchanges
• Paid / Sponsored Links
• Links from Spun Content
• Unnatural links (links from irrelevant websites)
• Participating in link schemes
• Link from duplicate content. (If scrapers link to you, no problem. If you go out of your way to rank using them: BIG PROBLEM)
• Links from banned/penalised websites.
• Any or every manipulative link building practice.
• Excessive use if exact match keywords as anchor text

Things to focus on

• Niche – get links from sites that are relevant. The links don’t have to come from an extremely tight niche. (In fact, that is often a sign of a low quality site), but the connection should make sense.
• Advanced – your link building techniques shouldn’t rely on something that anybody could do easily.
• Legitimate – your link building efforts should be justified as marketing alone even in the absence of search engines.
• Vary keywords as anchor text – Tons of links with the exact same text is simply unnatural, even in your own marketing efforts. Focus on text that gets clicks-through, not that use a particular keyword.
• Brand perspective – your promotional efforts should fit with your brand.
• Content marketing – Obviously this got huge this year. You should focus on producing content that is naturally shared and linked. In other words, link earning in addition to link building.
• Getting citations – you should make it clear to the search engines what your brand name is so that the search engine can recognise when it is mentioned without a link. Google is using a statistical data and co-citation to rank sites using off-site factors that go beyond links, so focus on creating buzz and getting discussions about your brand going.

I hope this article has helped also if anyone needs any assistance my email is [email protected]
If you have any additional tips to add please post them in the comments section