SEO for the everyday business owner - the 4 must do's

Keeping your website well optimised can be a frustrating and time consuming task. We are often asked by our clients about the best ways to keep a site visible to search engines after we have done initial work and hence this list of tips was born!

1. Know what keywords you are targeting and keep them in mind when writing any new content. As a general rule try to thread keywords into your content without taking away from the reader experience. Search engines look for keywords within your content however excessive repetition is penalised. You can avoid this using singular and plural forms of a keyword, using synonyms, adding in modifiers, e.g. company, service, best etc and by mixing up the word order.
   
   
2. Always use title, head and meta tags. This has become much easier to implement with the advent of user friendly content management systems. All good content management systems now come with a built in SEO section where it is simply a case of inputting the information into the desired fields without having to know how HTML works. Additionally, title tags and meta descriptions can have a great impact on your click through rate because if they are more relevant to the search term than a competitor’s site, the searcher is more inclined to click through to your site. All tags and descriptions need to be unique for each page and relevant to the content on that specific page.
   
   
3. Work on your internal linking. Search engines look at how your content is linked within your site to establish what you consider to be most important. You need to focus internal links to landing pages that are most strongly targeting your keywords. Ideally these landing pages should be high in the site architecture (one or two clicks from the home page) and where possible, links should be from text (not images) containing keywords.
   
   
4. Keep adding new content. Search engines are very interested in websites that consistently add new content. This also triggers the search engines to index your site more often, resulting in a quicker improvement in your rankings. The easiest way to keep on top of this is to write a blog or develop a news section. Write optimised articles (using the above tips) on your area of expertise constantly and post them on your website. Doing this will also help create a more engaged visitor experience.