In this audio material, Nick Leech, Group Marketing Director at 123-reg, talks about six major SEO tips for absolute beginners.
The first basic SEO step is to add Google Webmasters Tool to your site. Introducing a simple line of code will enable you to have access to essential information about the way in which Google evaluates your website. You learn numerous details such as the recommended number of page that your site should have, whether the titles and descriptions of your web pages are duplicate or not, the exact search queries for which your website is ranked, as well as any potential malware issues present on your website. Google Webmasters Tool is a valuable tool to use in order to address a great deal of SEO-related aspects.
A second important SEO rule is to ensure that each page of your website has a unique and distinct title and description. The title is the main part of the link to your website, whereas the description is the smaller black text beneath it, and these two serve as an advert of your website to the visitors. This is the reason why they should be as compelling and assertive as possible. The former also needs to be within a 65-character limit.
Thirdly, a great content is what really counts in terms of basic efficient SEO. The text, images and video material featured on your website should be both interesting to the users and relevant to your business. Moreover, these elements have to be unique, therefore copying the content of other websites is not recommended. Quantity has an important role as well and you need to provide enough content (a few images accompanied by a single line of text won't do) so that Google can 'label' it appropriately and rank your site for the corresponding search queries.
A fourth primary SEO rule is to not buy links. In the past, a way to gain a better ranking in the Google search results was to buy links. However, this is no longer the case as Google now penalises the users that resort to this procedure. Therefore, avoid using this trick unless you want to see your site positioned in a much lower position in the search results or removed altogether.
The fifth principle of the SEO basics resides in narrowing your keywords to a local 'area'. For instance, if you run a restaurant in the UK, you are advised to focus on keywords that are local to your geographic area and related to its specific. Therefore, the area where your business is situated and the type of restaurant you run represent two main sources of keywords. This way, you will be competing with fewer similar websites and your content will be more relevant to the visitors.
And the final basic tip is to constantly keep track of the latest developments in the ever changing field of SEO. To be able to do this, you can either follow our Swift 6 series or refer to other valuable related sites, such as moz.com, Search Engine Journal (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/) or Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com/ ).
Therefore, feel free to check out the other 6 materials related to ways of improving your presence online at 123-reg Swift 6!
