10 SEO Tips You Should Know About

Search engine optimization is a constantly evolving process, where old techniques become obsolete or even counter-productive as new ones emerge. WestHost has compiled a list of SEO tips you should integrate into any digital marketing strategies for 2018…

Top 10 SEO Tips:

1.   Ensure your site is mobile optimized. Search engines consider how well a site displays on tablets and smartphones as a key metric in ranking results. Minimize sub-pages and abolish pop-ups, which can now be ranked as the page’s primary content.
2.   Upload content regularly. This persuades the engines your site is topical and active. However, they’re looking for quality original content, not keyword-stuffing. Write to keep people on your site as long as possible, but don’t be afraid to delete older posts.
3.   Keep your social media profiles busy. Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Snapchat profiles will wither on the vine if they’re not regularly updated. Use them to add inbound links to your site, in tandem with guest blog links and reciprocal links from reputable sites.
4.  Harness topical subjects and undertake keyword research. Social media is great for topicality, so tweet and post in response to news stories. Show you’re plugged into your industry by offering advice – modern audiences love listicles like this one!
5.  Upload a sitemap and a robots.txt file. This is a very basic SEO tip, but it makes a real difference to the search engines’ ability to interpret and rank your site’s content. It’ll also encourage you to standardize your links with descriptive canonical URLs.
6.  Use tags. Page titles, image tags, meta descriptions…they all exist to improve understanding of that page’s content. Key SEO tips include ensuring any tags, infographics or page titles incorporate long tail keywords of 3-5 words in length.
7.   Optimize your site’s loading speed. Forty per cent of users will abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. Strip out superfluous plugins, compress graphics, remove unnecessary pages and use caching. Time really is of the essence.
8.  Make it local. Millions of sites will use a certain keyword, but how many will have that keyword plus your hometown? Sprinkle your site and tags with geographic identifiers to attract relevant custom from your core markets. Every word counts.
9.  Use analytics tools. SEO tips don’t come much hotter than this one. Tools like SEMrush and Moz can identify trends or issues, such as where audiences arrive from and which pages lead to site abandonment. Some even identify areas of weakness among your rivals.
10.  Speculate to accumulate. If your best efforts haven’t propelled your site onto the mythical first page of Google, why not advertise? Google AdWords and Bing Ads are obvious starting points, for simple (yet prominent) text-based ads charged per click.

Because search engine optimization evolves with every Google algorithm update, our final tip would be to treat SEO as an ongoing organic project. Don’t think that launching a website spells the end of your involvement – you should always be looking to fix 404 errors or broken backlinks, appealing to new markets and optimizing tag usage.