1. Add your company to Google Local Business (the little map at the top of search results). Free to register & try putting your product or service in as the Company name!
2. Make sure that popular search keywords and associated terms are in the Page Description, copy and Page Title.
3, Adwords – bit of a cheat here, but you can quite often obtain a free voucher for Adwords campaign. Try ebay – usually a huge discount!
4. Make sure that the images on your site have relevant keyword names and ‘Alt’ tags. Good for Google Images results & SEO
5. No Flash navigation or ’splash pages’! Absolutely not
6. Use a Google Site Map – its Google-friendly, Accessibility-friendly and Blackberry-friendly. Its just SOOO friendly!
7. Make sure you have your contact details in the page footer – nobody uses Yellow Pages, (I don’t even know where our’s is) so your website is usually the first place to find where you are (quite often when I’m running late for a meeting)!
8. Keep the content refreshed. News or blog pages are a great way of updating, providing you have something interesting to say. Suggest weekly additions, and dont forget to keep them keyword-rich.
9. Try and obtain back(inbound) links from popular sites. If you issue media releases, make sure that they have your web address in.
10. Use Google analytics/stats package to monitor referring sites, search terms, popular pages etc. And keep an eye on the ‘bounce’ rate – a sure sign of something to improve if this starts to rise.
and, because we always try and give a bit extra…
11. DON’T believe the guarantees from telemarketing or spam SEO companies – Google doesn’t publish its algorithms, you don’t always know what your competitors strategy is, and Google themslves advise avoiding!
Any more tips, and you’ll have to pay me!
