Effective Search Engine Optimisation is a time consuming task which requires experience and specialist skills. Many web site providers claim to provide a search engine optimisation service however extremely few UK websites are currently well optimised if their aim is to achieve page 1 SERPS. Though you can simply just add a tracking code to your web pages for website analytics tools to start measuring your web stats, Google Analytics (and products similar to it) have website plugins and add-ons that tremendously expand the reporting capabilities. It takes time to research your market and industry. It takes time to perform the necessary analyses. And it takes time to product quality content. Opening paragraphs shouldn’t be longer than one or two sentences. Make sure the thing you’re writing about is mentioned in the first sentence (i.e. your focus keyword or phrase). I like to bold the first paragraph to make it distinct.

Attract links, stop chasing links

Linking to highly popular or trusted websites, news pages, blogs and message boards is an excellent way to add credibility to your own website. If you’re pulling proof for the claims you make from sources which a majority of other people already trust, it can only help you to make more conversions from your website visitors and ultimately lead to an increase in sales. The number of referring individual domains linking to your website or webpage is a very important factor in Google’s algorithm. Google has stated that meta descriptions are NOT a ranking signal. But, the quality of the description will influence click-through rate, so it is very important to use this element wisely… Ideally, if you’re running your own small business, doing your own writing establishes you as the authority. Everyone likes to deal with the owner, and this provides a way to establish many relationships with customers simply through generating your own content.

How do search engines determine relevance and popularity amongst such a large number of results?

A marketer who dives deep on this topic can find dozens of opportunities to enhance their listing and earn more traffic. Because these days, it’s not enough to rank. It is important to have at least one keyword in your title. In addition, you should have your keywords in your meta descriptions, headers (h1 tags) and in the ALT descriptions and titles of images. Generally speaking you don’t want orphan pages (those that aren’t linked to by other pages), nor do you want an overly-messy link structure. Check to see if the domain is indexed by putting “site:example.com” in the Google search bar. If it is, that’s a good sign, but if it isn’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the domain was de-indexed due to a penalty. It might just have been out of commission for awhile, so Google felt it was not necessary to keep the site in its index.

Landing page analysis is important for SEO

Many SEO experts agree that a website's inbound links will be crucial this year, with many contending that there importance will increase as search engine algorithms increase their attention on penalizing poor links. Your website should be designed with your visitor in mind. Nobody wants to wait a long time for a page to load, and slow site speeds will tempt visitors to visit a competitor’s page. Search engines drive dramatic quantities of focused traffic, comprising people intent on accomplishing their research and purchasing goals. Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "Anyone with a site that provides useful content and has the right network can now drive organic traffic."

Not all negative SEO attacks are readily noticeable

One of the most important steps when starting with SEO is to align it with your wider goals. It’s useful to set initial goals for what you want to achieve with your content to explore how to involve SEO in the process. There are plenty of business owners whose websites haven’t been updated in years who are being left behind by major shifts in digital marketing. You don’t want to be one of those people. In the long run, not changing with the times hurts your business. There’s little worse than being notified your website has spam or seeing an alert in search results that your website might have been hacked. A great way to up your SEO in a general sense is to regularly update your site with quality long-form content. This could be in the form of a video, a podcast, or more commonly, a blog.