SEO optimisations is
one of those things that you can hear a different approach to increasing a websites
ranking and traffic from just about anyone. The amount of time I have had
clients that have known a small part of what makes up SEO and tried to tell me
how to best optimise their website is phenomenal, this is largely due to how
SEO ranking factors have changed over the years as Google has continued to
improve their ranking algorithms.
Keeping it Simple
At an overview level
Google will always try to best and most relevant result for what the user is
searching for. If you keep that perspective in mind when you are trying to
optimise your website for search rankings, then you will stay on the right
track. Build up the amount of quality content based around the keywords you are
targeting and then worry about the smaller SEO optimisations. A website that
has every possible technical & niche optimisation possible simply won’t
rank higher than a website full of great written content that has been poorly
optimised. I can’t stress enough that just jamming the keyword “apple pie” into
a page will not get you to rank number one for apple pie. Now that’s out of the
way, lets get into a few of the factors that I have found to been crucial to
ranking well on google
Tread Carefully
Make sure you always
make a backup of your website before you make any changes, sometimes the
simplest mistake can wreak havoc to your websites rankings. It is always a good
idea to keep note of all changes you have made when you are working on your
website in case something does go wrong and you see a drop in rankings.
Trustworthiness
As Google indexes your
website, it will look at the amount of written content and the quality of the
content on your site, It will also look to see what sites have linked to your
website. This is how Google will determine whether your website is trustworthy
or not, newer websites that are less than a couple years old simply will not
rank higher than a more well-established website that has been around for 5 or
more years. This is why SEO is not a
platform for get rich quick schemes, it takes constant work to build up your
websites content over time and see results in the long run, not the short term
Mobile, Speed & Security
Mobile and speed
optimisations are quickly becoming more and more important to your websites
ranking as Googles algorithms are increasingly becoming more focused towards
mobile devices. This means that the content on your website must load quickly
and be responsive for the device that you are looking at it on. Google has also
recently introduced security as a ranking factor, you can easily give your site
a boost by installing an SSL certificate on your web hosting and forcing all
connections to load over https using a simple plugin for WordPress.