SEO Tips – Our Top 10

With so much information available about SEO, we decided to condense it all for you in the form of our top 10 SEO tips which we hope you’ll find useful for your promoting your small business online.

• Do your keyword research

Before you try and optimise your website it’s critical to know what words and phrases you want to be found for online. Our separate article “10 tips for effective keyword research” has more information on how to go about this.

• Create a site map

A site map is a directory of all the pages on your website and if you don’t have one, it could make life more difficult for the search engine robots to crawl and index your site. Make sure your web designer adds a site map otherwise you may struggle to get the search engine rankings you want.

• Use keyword rich anchor text links

Anchor text links are words that are linked from one page of your website to another. These are primarily to guide the reader when they’re on your site but can also have SEO benefits. Using your chosen keyword or phrase as your anchor text or within it can help boost your search engine rankings. For example, rather than using “contact us” as your link text, you could use “contact a London Architect now”.

• Use bold for your keywords

Your chosen keywords or phrases should occur naturally throughout the text on your website and it’s a good idea to highlight in bold one or two of these occurrences where appropriate on each page. Again, the benefit of doing this is two-fold, it can help you reinforce a point to people reading your site and also help to improve your online rankings for the word or phrase you’ve highlighted.

• Optimise your headlines and sub-headings

The main headline on each page of your website should contain your chosen keyword or phrase, and if possible this should be incorporated into your sub-headings too. In terms of SEO, it’s important to have your main headline coded as an H1 tag and your sub-headings as H2, H3 etc. Again, make sure you speak to your web designer about this aspect of the coding.

• Optimise your alt tags

Alt tags are the words which appear when you hover over an image on your website with a mouse. Alt tags should include relevant text to describe the image and if you can incorporate your chosen keywords into that description then all the better when it comes to SEO.

• Optimise your meta tags

Meta tags often get overlooked by web designers and copywriters, but they are very important. You need to optimise your meta tags using the keywords and phrases you’ve identified in tip #1. Your meta title tells the search engines what your site is about as well as appearing in the search engine results as a bold header.

Your meta description is the two lines of text that appear underneath your meta title in the search engine results and are your opportunity to hook potential customers. Using your keywords/phrases in your meta description is important for attracting the attention of people using search engines.

• Get incoming links

When you’ve just launched a new website for your small business another area of SEO you can try yourself is link building. There are many directory sites out there which are a good starting point for getting incoming links to your site and generating more traffic. More information is available by reading our article “A beginner’s guide to link building”.

• Start a blog

As well as relevant incoming links from trusted sites, the search engines also place a great deal of importance on unique, relevant and regular content. A great way to do this is by starting a blog for your business which is updated frequently. By building articles and news stories around the keywords and phrases you want to target, you can improve your search engine rankings.

• Take a long term view

The fact that it’s quick and easy to get information on almost any subject online makes some people think the process of SEO should be the same, but it’s not. You need to be realistic when it comes to how much time and effort you’ll need to put into achieving your desired rankings as it can takes years in some cases, depending on the popularity of the phrases being targeted, the activity of your competitors, how often you update your site, and many other factors.

If you want a quick fix, then you may want to look at “A beginner’s guide to Pay per Click” as an alternative to a long term SEO strategy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 25th, 2010 at 9:06 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.