Top 10 SEO tips and tricks

There are various ways you can leverage your SEO without directly paying for your page to come up first on search. Some are more effective than others, so here are our top 10 SEO tricks and things don't google is looking for.

1. You need to think of the Google Algorithm as a blind person. When it looks at the site they view the metadata and the keywords in the copy essentially what the site is talking about. If you are a wedding photographer and your homepage never explicitly mentions wedding photography then your website won’t rank as well as a site that mentions wedding photography. If your site specifically mentions your niche it gives indicators to the algorithm that your page is important for that topic. That does not mean you should go into your page and mention wedding photography a million times. Google recognises this as trying to game the system and will blacklist your site.

2. Google sites: Put your URL into Google sites and it will investigate the code, how your site has been built and how friendly it is to the algorithm. You can then give this to your developer and just by the developer fixing the things that google sites has highlighted as weak spots it can improve your sites ranking.

3. Backlinking: Reaching out to shoulder niches you can sponsor an article on their site. This then gets those pages pointing to your site this gives the Algorithm indicators that your site is more important and which ever site is hosting your blog article gets free content. Ie a wedding photographer and a Cake Maker.

4. Work on your domain authority and page authority. Domain authority is how trusted you are as a website to google. Page authority is how good your content is and how often it gets referenced elsewhere.

5.DONT COPY AND PASTE: Imagery can be dissected and analysed by google. There is a lot of metadata that is saved behind your images. The algorithm analyses that data and decides whether the more or less relevant based on whether it is a stock image or a custom built image for the page. Google does not like multiple sites with identical content. Google can do this by analysing the image pixel by pixel not just from the metadata so changing the tone of the image or cropping it won't work either.

6. When you write copy you need to ensure that it is unique to your site. Making sure your copy is unique, changing the wording even on sites that might be a resellers of the same product helps make it more unique to the algorithm. A short description like ‘red cotton socks’ is not an issue but paragraphs of copy need to be differentiated so that your site remains unique from others in your market. Using a site like Copyscape can help you to find all the URLs that have similar wording.

7. Describe the images with the alt tag. This is helpful for visually impaired people using your site and again gives more information to the google algorithm.

8. Anchor tags. Having relevant anchor tags to other pages helps the algorithm determine if you are more relevant to that topic.

9. Page load. Structured data is little snippets of data that code in the back end so that if amazon or a reader is viewing the site it tells the algorithm what parts of the page are about. Smart systems and speakers use structured data to find pages.

10. Ask an expert for help, DIY websites can only take you so far. At the end of the day someone who does this for a living can get better results in far less time and with way less stress for you.