The top 5 SEO tips

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is a way of ensuring that customers and prospective customers can find your website online easily. Here are the top five tips to maximise the visibility of your site:

1. Before you conduct any SEO activity, you need to choose your search keywords wisely. You can check the popularity of relevant keywords at many websites for free, including Google Insights. A search term with a high popularity and low competitiveness is ideal.

2. The domain name of your website should include a search keyword. For example, if you have a designer shoes website, having a url such as designershoes.co.uk would increase visibility. The keyword or words should also be included in the ‘metatag’ in the coding of the home page.

3. Ensure that you have plenty of links coming into your website, from online press releases, partner sites, emails, blogs, social networking sites and more. To maximise the effect of your SEO, they should be high quality and come through to as many different pages on your website as possible, where relevant, not just the home page.

4. Add good quality keyword-rich content onto your website, including articles, blog entries and general page content. If you use them too much in the text, the search engines become suspicious and will lower the rank of your page; around 2-8% usage in the website text is thought to be ideal for SEO.

5. Use relevant SEO keywords in the navigation of your pages. This means that your main keywords are in prime location on every page of your website, maximising your search engine ranking.