10 SEO Tips from the Experts
Friday, July 11th, 2008I read an interesting article in Visibility Magazine this morning called “10 Critical Errors to Avoid With Your SEO Campaign.” The article actually tells you what NOT to do, but I’m going to rearrange some things and share what TO do:
- Do SEO more than once. SEO is an ongoing process and unfortunately you can’t go through it once and be done. Consistently staying with it is the only way to insure your rankings remain high.
- Go slow. Especially with new sites, it’s important to make major changes slowly. Search engines see a lot of change as a red flag. So if you have big ideas, great! Just make them over time…unless it’s OK that your rankings might drop significantly for awhile.
- Experiment with your page titles. Since page titles are a hot spot for keywords, constantly research for new ones! That’s a great way for search engines to see you’re updating your pages.
- Remember that SEOs can’t deliver a #1 Ranking every time. We aren’t magicians, although that would be nice. Be sure not to expect the world, and also look out for promises from SEOs that sound too good to be true.
- Pick the right keywords. This one is pretty obvious right? Don’t go after the really competitive words, and remember those keywords in the long-tail searches your customers are doing.
- Keep building links. Again, SEO is an ongoing part of your site- so be on the look out for new opportunities to build relationships via link love.
- Keep your company aligned. This suggestion is more of a general marketing guideline. This simply means to share marketing ideas and concepts between everyone in your organization. In other words – everyone should be on the same page at all times.
- Always remember good website practices. In the quest to get more traffic, it’s easy to forget something like basic usability guidelines – but don’t! Search engines are learning to read sites like humans more and more everyday, and your customers are humans – so gear the site to them!
- Rankings are cool, but what about traffic and conversions? This goes along with #8. At the end of the day, the point of higher rankings is to make more profit. Right? So just keep this in mind in your SEO campaign.
- You can ALWAYS add more content. A lot of content is key. Search engines like it. So keep updating your content, and if you run out of ideas, you can always add something like an FAQ section.
After reading them, a lot of these suggestions seem like the hand-to-the-forehead kind. But the truth is that there’s a ton of things to remember in your SEO campaign, and usually they’re like these: simple and easy to fix.