10 Most Important SEO Tips You Need To Know

SEO has changed a lot over the years, and there is a lot of SEO tips available online. Although it’s forever changing and Google are always releasing updates to their algorithms, certain fundamental principles remain unchanged.

For example, an important piece to the puzzle is still your target keywords, however how they’re used, and how Google crawls them has changed.

With so many different SEO techniques, it has become virtually impossible to determine which ones are actually worth sticking with and which ones you can completely ignore.

Does social media effect your organic rankings? Or is link building a thing of the past?

Brian Dean did a fantastic job on showcasing 200 Google ranking factors which was a great hit with some amazing information. This post won’t be as in-depth as his – I want to give you the 10 most important SEO tips you need to know.

1. Improve your page speed

Page speed is a crucial factor in SEO.

Previously with Google you could get away with a website that wasn’t as fast as a supercar. Even big companies such as news websites you could sometimes wait a few minutes just to load their website.

It was never a good experience to wait minutes to load a single web page, but as it was years ago, no one knew anything different.

Nowadays, with faster technology websites are quick. A slow page frustrates users and discourages people from buying your product.

Did you know: website conversion rates drop by an average of 7% for a one-second delay.

If you make £10,000 a month from your website – that’s £700 a month you are losing – £8,400 a year. Can you imagine just ripping up £8,400 a year and throwing it down the drain?

Unless you’re mega rich, I doubt you’d want to be throwing this much money away.

If you’re a potential buyer a website that takes a long time to load screams untrustworthy and unsafe – even if it is 100% legitimate.

According to research, 40% of people will leave a webpage that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Website speed has become so relevant and important that Google themselves included site speed as one of the all-important ranking factors.. and Google don’t normally tell us what those factors are!

This means if your pages are slow, your fighting a losing battle.. you’re walking up an escalator backwards in terms of organic rankings. No matter what your website looks like, or what content you have – if it’s slow, you won’t rank.

What's slowing down my website?

Now this is a very open, generic question that can have numerous answers, but you really do need to find out what is slowing down your website before you start making any drastic changes.

Thankfully, there are plenty of free tools out there to test how fast your site is. These tools are fast and free, so it’s worth giving them ago.

There are many, many more so if you don’t like any of these ones, a quick Google search will bring you more options.

These sites will show you how quickly your site loads on both mobile and desktop. If you don’t score 100% then it will give you suggestions on where you can improve the speed, and will also give you instructions to improve it. You can then either do it yourself, or give it to your digital marketing company to do.

2. Have Analytics In Place From The Start

So you’ve started to do SEO, or maybe you’ve decided to hire an SEO company. Either way, you need to make sure you have software and tools in place for you to be able to track your website data and see what’s working and what’s not.

Two of the initial tools you must have are Google Analytics, and Google Search Console. They are easy to set up and just require you to enter a snippet of code into your website.

Tools like HotJar are also interesting bits of kit you can use which show you a different type of data. one of their tools is a heatmap, showing you where your visitors are clicking and how they navigate your website.

You should have these analytics in place before you even have the first visitor to your page. The more data you receive, the more you can improve and optimise your site.

3. Link to Other Websites with Relevant Content

Some people think that linking out to other relevant pages is bad because it takes users off your website and onto a competitors.

That’s not necessarily correct. As Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger says:

Linking out to other blogs is critical for growth.

Link building is, and always will be a fundamental art of a search engine optimisation strategy. As you may have seen, multiple times I have linked out to tons of high-quality sites and sources, many of which offer exactly the same service as we do.

Why do we do it? Because it helps the reader, it gives them more information and allows them to further their research into the topic. Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog puts it perfectly:

The more you send people away to more valuable resources, the more valuable you become to your target audience.

Links are like presents at Christmas… you cant take take take and not be prepared to give. You can’t expect to get links from others if you’re unwilling to give first. You need to show willingness to link out to blogs from your own content before other blogs will start looking at you with the thought of giving you a link.

This doesn’t mean you should spam fill your pages with lots of links in every sentence from a whole range of random websites.

You should only link out to pages that offer good value. Link building is all about quality, not quantity. If you have a few authoritative links rather than a dozen of poor quality links, you’ll build more trust within your niche.

4. Write Unique and Relevant Meta Descriptions for Every Page

Meta descriptions are one of the few SEO tips that always get left behind. You will hear people tell you ‘meta descriptions don’t provide any value to SEO’ or ‘meta descriptions don’t effect your Google Rankings’.

Ignoring them is step 1 here.

The meta description is the first section people will see, along side the page title, when you visit a SERP (search engine results page).

If you type in “digital marketing company bournemouth” and a result comes up with the meta description of “iphone for sale”, would you click it? Probably not, so if no one clicks on this website, do you think it will be ranking highly on Google? Again, probably not.

Google, and other search engines, hate duplicate content. Sure there are occasions where you need to cite a paragraph and link it back, but if your constantly publishing duplicate content, you’ll start to realise you won’t get anywhere.

Here are a few tips to remember:

Keep your page titles between 30-70 characters.
Keep meta descriptions under 160 characters.
Include your target keyword(s).
Make sure the title and descriptions are unique for every page.

Meta descriptions need to be relevant to the page that it is on. If you use WordPress (which you should, if you don’t – look into it!) there are plugins you can use that help with meta descriptions. All-in-One SEO is one we’d recommend.

5. Use Simple URL Structures

URL’s are the thing people are going to remember, it’s how people will find you again and return to your website. If users can’t read, understand or remember your URL, then search engines will be the same.

Take a look at the URL of this article: https://dms-solutions.co.uk/10-strategies-to-optimise-your-ppc-ads/.

This URL isn’t the shortest URL in the world, but it’s easy to read and easy to understand for both the user and for the search engine. If your URL looks something like this: https://www.example.co.uk/news/43749073 then you need to look at changing it.

Use Keywords
Be readable
Be concise

6. Use Keywords In The Right Places

You’re probably already aware that you should be adding keywords to pages that you want to rank for. Where you use your keywords is just as important as how many times you use them.

There are some main places you want to use your keywords. Specifically, you want to ensure that your keyword appears at least once in your title tag, webpage URL, your H1 header, and within the first 100 words of your content.

When Google crawls your website it wants to see how relevant you are. By having keywords in the right places, it will crawl your URL and see your keyword. It will then crawl through your headers and see the keyword in your H1 header. The crawler will continue through your content and see the keyword popping up which the crawler will then see that you are relevant to the search, allowing you to rank higher for it.

Although you need to use keywords on your website, make sure you are not keyword stuffing. This will have a negative impact on your search rankings as Google has implemented measures to stop this practice.

7. Use Internal Links

Internal links can effectively improve crawlability, user experience, and credibility. These links direct users to other pages on your website. They are used to help web crawlers find your content and encourage users to stay longer on your website and visit a variety of pages.

Internal linking is a key process and is apart of what we offer through our SEO Packages. See what we did there? That’s an internal link. I’ve linked you to another page on our website that is relevant and offers you further information on a topic without having to leave this website.

There are tools to check your internal linking to see how you’re doing with websites such as seoptimer.com

8. Conduct Regular Site Audits

Performing regular audits on your website helps to ensure you website remains fully optimised. It will help you catch any issues that may have come up or you could have missed, like broken links, or slow load times. Then, you can address them before they have an impact on your website.

There are plenty of tools out there, as previously mentioned, that allow you to conduct website audits.

9. Research Your Competitors

So you search the keywords you want to be found for, and you’ll see that your biggest rivals are creating a similar type of content, and targeting the same audience as you. But they’re top of Page 1.. and you’re not?

By analysing your competitors websites, you can learn more about how you can effectively use your content, or it can help you gather more ideas for you to create new content.

First you need to identify who you’re actual important rivals are. If you’re a tiny start up furniture company, I highly doubt IKEA is your main rival. The SEMrush traffic analysis tool can help you track competitors and how much traffic they generate as well as their traffic channels and sources.

With these tools you can also get an overview of their organic search performance, which shows you their top-performing pages.

Have a look at the keywords tool that is offered to identify keywords that your competitor is ranking for. You may find some keywords there that you’re missing out on. There’s a reason your rivals are outperforming you on organic search rankings, so take a leaf out of there book and adapt yourself.

10. Continue Learning About SEO

You’ve probably heard it countless times before, but that’s because it’s true – Google’s algorithm is constantly changing – and as it does continuously change, the whole digital environment evolves. If you’re not always learning and researching SEO, you’re not staying ahead of the game.

There are so many ways you can keep up to date: blogs, ebooks, podcasts, videos, webinars and so much more. The internet provides you tonnes of information and resources all at your fingertips.

Want to learn something now? Check out one of our other articles on PPC, another great way to market your company: 10 Strategies To Optimise Your PPC Ads

Final Thoughts

If you want your business to reach the heights that you dream of, then you need SEO. No one knows everything about SEO, even the seasoned professionals. SEO is a process of constant learning, experimentation, and creativity. These are just a few of the hundreds of tips you could give our producing better results and rankings on SERPs.

If you’re not sure where to start, or need help with your SEO then feel free to get in touch with us.