8 Essential Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tips

1) Be realistic

Everybody knows the “ideal” keyword that they would like to rank for, but the chances of ranking well for this keyword may be slim / almost impossible in competitive industries.

Be realistic with yourself in terms of the amount of time, money and effort required to rank well for these search terms. Does the potential reward justify the time and effort? Are your competitors actively carrying out SEO work? Would the rewards of achieving 6th / 7th position justify the effort? Are you competing against big brands outsourcing their SEO to large search marketing companies?

Prioritise your tasks and look at outsourcing opportunities if you do not have the time necessary to complete tasks. You should be asking yourself all of these questions before deciding on a primary keyword to target.

2) Set short term and long term goals

Related to the point above, setting realistic short and long term goals are great ways of staying motivated. Keep the short term goals towards longer tail search terms. If you already have a relatively established site, which terms are currently driving significant amounts of traffic? How easy will it be to increase the ranking of this term?

Use click through rate data to predict the number of clicks you can achieve. For example, if you rank 9th for “purple mice”, and receive 22 visitors per month, if you increased this 4 places to 5th, you could expect to almost double this number.

Look through all of your search terms looking for good short term search strategies. Longer term goals should be your more competitive keywords, often with a 6-8+ month timescale (depending on industry) for achieving good rankings.

3) Research

Spend a lot of time researching every aspect of your strategy. Keywords, potential link building strategies, onsite work, content, industry authorities, competition. In order to have a credible search marketing strategy, all of these factors need to be analysed in as much detail as possible.

4) Competitors

One of the most important individual factors to focus on is the competition. How good is their onsite SEO? Have they missed obvious tricks? Can you take positive things from their site design /structure and implement it yourself? How impressive are your competitors’ backlink profiles? How are they going about obtaining back links? Is there scope to replicate strategies, or further improve on strategies your competitors have implemented?

5) Use available tools

There are a number of useful tools out there today to help with all aspects of SEO and search marketing. The use of Google webmaster tools, and rank checking software are a definite must. Google trends and Google Adword keyword suggestion tools are great resources for keyword research.

Other handy tools include SEO plug-ins for the Firefox browser, spider simulators and keyword density tools. There are multiple versions of many tools, it is worth spending a little bit of time trying each one.

6) Stay up to date

The SEO industry is changing all of the time, so it is important to stay up to date with the latest developments. Reading SEO blogs and browsing SEO discussion forums are a great way of staying informed of the latest developments. By doing so, you will also learn a lot, be it a new link building idea or a new handy plugin which may save you a lot of time.

7) Wider picture

Look at your search marketing campaign from broader picture, what else could you be doing in online marketing that will have a positive impact on your backlink profile / traffic / rankings?

For example, if your site has a blog, are you using blog pinging services (Google's own service or services such as Weblogs and Feedburner). Are you utilising local search, universal search elements? How appropriate is your site to social media outlets?

8) Stay 'white hat'

There are a lot of SEO practices that are frowned upon by the search engines, if you are unaware of them, the chances are that you are not doing them. If you have heard or read of “new” SEO techniques, spend a lot of time researching their potential negative impacts before implementing them.

Search engine algorithms are getting better and better at detecting techniques used to purposely manipulate their algorithm. Read their guidelines and stay within them, if you decide to implement grey hat or black hat techniques, it is only a matter of time before you are found out and penalised.

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