Many would say that SEO is changing too rapidly and often in unexpected ways. Keeping track of those changes is a real challenge but we believe that at its core SEO hasn’t changed that much.

Quality content has to be at the heart of any SEO strategy. However, there are better tools and techniques for staying up to date, which can help you accomplish a lot and measure your results properly. The basics of good SEO have remained more or less the same. We are in no way saying that SEO is useless, but it is slightly overrated.

Consider your own habits – how many new business partners or suppliers have you discovered as the result of a search engine result? Of course certain businesses do really well from getting the SEO right, emergency plumbers has to be one, but think about some of the most successful companies that have emerged throughout the years – Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Hotmail – now think how important SEO was to you in discovering them? Our guess is SEO didn’t have a major role, you were already searching for the company, you weren’t searching for a “popular social network where I can see embarrassing pictures of my friends in compromising situations”.

Which does not make SEO useless, yet you need to be able to place this activity correctly in the overall marketing mix. Because that is what SEO is – a part of the whole, not the whole. Therefore, spending crazy amounts of time and money only on SEO, excluding other elements, is not the smartest tactic in your marketing strategy.

You should place a healthy amount of importance on ensuring that you are optimised and will at least be discovered by your own company name. Here we have gathered some essential SEO tips that you might enjoy implementing.

1. Choose the keywords you’re going to target – seriously, once and for all, befriend Google Keyword Planner.

2. Get a domain name that includes one of those keywords, but if you can’t then don’t beat yourself up.

3. Write content for people first and for search engines second. If you try to optimise blog articles for SEO all the time, chances are your content will suffer. Just focus on writing good content – that’s one of the best tactics actually.

4. Register your website for Google Analytics. Needless to say more.

5. Measure, learn, improve – this is a cycle, keep repeating.

6. Register for Google Webmaster Tools. Then analyse each element of your website that might need to be fixed.

7. Speed up your website if you want to stand a chance at any decent Google ranking. If you are using WordPress (like we are), get a WordPress caching plugin to help you with that.

8. If you can’t speed up your website yourself, consider using a Content Delivery Network.

9. Optimize your HTML code; get rid of all that’s irrelevant.

10. Optimise your CSS or reduce it to make sure your website is fast and works across multiple browsers.

11. Next up, optimise your JavaScript – sometimes it could even be the new version of an old script that will speed up your website.

12. While you’re at it, remove all old scripts and the tools you are not using.

13. We’ll say it just once – avoid using frames. Just say no. And quit all those <iframe> tags as well. Frames confuse search engine robots.

14. Don’t go overboard with Flash. And don’t make the mistake of building your entire site in Flash.

15. Make sure your links work. You can check them with Screaming Frog and/or Xenu. Fix ‘404 File Not Found’ errors on your site.

16. Check your website for duplicate content. Use Google Webmaster Tools for that.

17. Create corporate pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Get active. Today.

18. Good content is the best kind of SEO, but only if you add it regularly. Make sure each piece is informative and interesting.

19. Post articles on other websites and make sure you include a short biography of yourself with a link to your blog or website. That’s building your inbound links.

20. You want to be authoritative? Then be responsible. Have a Privacy Policy on your website.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of our SEO tips. In the meantime, share with us some of the tips that you believe in. Or get your SEO report from us.