You’ve probably found and read many SEO principles or guidelines telling you the ‘do’s and don’ts’ of optimising your website. But when it all boils down, there is one core principle you should remember before doing anything: you are optimising for the user, not just the search engines.

Isn’t your goal to get potential customers to your website and keep them there? Of course it is! So you have to think of what’s best for the user, above all else. So, while you tailor your procedures to give Google’s spiders what they want, bear in mind that it’s your users who bring profit to your business. So, where do you begin?

Good quality content

People expect to get what they’re looking for. If they search for “Pizza” they don’t expect to land a page full of computer equipment. So, first and foremost your website needs relevant content aimed to give people what they’re after. So, use your resources to develop good quality content throughout your entire site. Remember, always follow the best SEO practices available.

Once your content is of a high standard, optimise each page for a single keyword. Distribute the keywords in the right places throughout your page, and incorporate them into your meta descriptions and title tags as well.

Make sure your keywords are used only a few times on each page, this ensures you don’t create a page full of ‘keyword stuffing’. And be careful not to duplicate content; you don’t want your site to be repetitive and redundant, and you especially don’t want keyword optimisation to seem too obvious.

If like many others, your website is at the core of your business, it’s paramount to only use content that’s relevant and valuable to your clients. If you keep your customers in mind when creating content, then the quality will come.

Now let’s talk about offpage SEO.

Natural looking links

Link building, that is creating links from other websites to point back to your website, is a huge part of SEO. When building these links, remember to make them appear natural looking as possible.

Google is a pretty smart cookie. It has algorithms which can actually disregard links you’ve created if they think they don’t add value. And one of the biggest blunders people make in SEO is undertaking huge volume link building, thinking ‘the more the merrier’. But natural links involve time, and if Google notices you’ve obtained masses of links overnight, they’re going to question their validity. So, to be safe, avoid these kind of tactics because they might drive you out of the search engines.

Top quality, natural links give you better chances of getting higher search rankings. What is a natural link? It’s when another website genuinely links back to your website because of relevance or helpfulness (eg. A blog post about Italian food links to a particular Italian restaurant’s website). So, where does that leave us?

Good SEO happens naturally

SEO should happen overtime and be just one phase of your online marketing process. The aim of the SEO game is to show you have what people are after, then grab people’s attention so they click through to your site, and finally to keep them engaged and on your page.

Ideally, your SEO should take a natural course in the long run. Your goal should be to have your audience enjoy and support your site, then hopefully share some of your great content and maybe even link to your site. As more and more of your clients link to your site out of their own volition, SEO then becomes a natural process. So how long does all this ‘natural’ stuff take? It can happen as quickly as a few weeks or take up to a few months. But the timeline all comes down to the specifics of your website and your competitive space online.

As you can see, SEO is just a portion of a bigger picture to make your business succeed. Your number one concern should be delivering an excellent product or service that people will want to talk about. That’s one of the best SEO principles you should follow. To get that right, you might want to leave SEO to the experts so you can focus on your business. Click on this link to find out how our expert web strategiests can help you.

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