My tips for better SEO

Just like the certainty of death and taxes, using blackhat techniques will, in the long run, come back to bite you on the preverbial. And they will impact on your search rankings.

What are blackhat techniques?

These are methods that try and manipulate Google results.

Things like keyword stuffing, manufactured or purchased backlinks, hidden keywords, creating meta data with keywords instead of legitimate descriptions, plaguerising content from other websites etc.

Always use best practices and you will reap the rewards.

Google places a big empasis on page load speeds.

If pages take too long to load, then visitors are likely to move on and look elsewhere.

Google know this, and the “User Experience” is given a lot of weight when it comes to rankings.

As far as Google is concerned, the faster the better, and this won’t change any time soon as a major ranking factor.

How do you improve website page load speeds?

Well you can start with good hosting.

Having your website on a Dedicated Server instead of entry level Shared Hosting makes a big difference.

The use of a Caching Plug-in like WP-Rocket is also useful.

FYI, our Dedicated Server includes access to the WP-Rocket Plug-in.

You should also make sure that any images on your website are optimised for web use.

And finally, if you are really serious, you might want to consider using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) like the Cloudflare CDN.

I and others have been using this catch cry for many many years now, and it will continue to be true forever.

Well written, interesting, original and relevant content will always serve you well.

You should constantly review your content and adjust and amend it as required to make sure it remains accurate and current.

Never just slap a few sentences together and use that as a Post on your website. If you don’t have at least 300 words, you are wasting your time. And let’s face it, if you can’t put together 300 words on a subject that you an expert on, you have a problem. And if your competitors are doing it, and you aren’t, who will Google send “searchers” to?

Look at your content from the perspective of someone visiting your website.

Does the content answer the sorts of questions people are looking for?

Is the content interesting and informative?

And does the content add value to your website, or are you just doing it because you think you should?

When you create a Page or a Post, think about creating links to other relevant Pages or Posts in your website.

For example, in one of the tips above, I mentioned using VPS Hosting.

And in that text, I linked to a Blog Post about our Dedicated Server, like I just did again here 😉

Internal linking helps Google crawl your website and identify important Pages or Posts.

And finally, make sure you use appropriate Page Titles and Meta Data descriptions.

Both need to reflect the content written on the pages, and preferably include some keywords (without going overboard).

You are restricted to the number of characters for each.

Exceeding the allowed number of characters won’t necessarily have an advers affect, but results that Google display will be limited to that number of characters.