Remember Creative

The best SEO advice you’ll ever receive

‘What should I do to get better SEO,’ people often ask us?

Their reasoning is usually that Google and other search engines keep changing the rules, so what they do today should be different to what they were doing yesterday.

We tell them that the best advice on search engine optimisation (SEO): give users the content they’re looking for and your site will rise to the top.

It’s such simple advice – yet so difficult to stick to when there are thousands of SEO companies out there promising a quick fix. Before you shell out for a ‘guaranteed’ boost in rankings, consider whether you’ve got these basics covered.

What do search engines want?  

Search engines vary in the methods they use to crawl and rank sites, but they’re all essentially hunting for content that is:

• It’s not enough for your site to focus solely on the hard sell. To outrank the competition, it’s important to offer content that helps those looking for information, along with products and services. Ideally, your content will also be the kind visitors want to share with their network and other sites will want to link to.

• Search engines look at the usability of your site as a whole when they serve up results. This means that everything from your site’s URL structure to mobile optimisation and internal links need to support a streamlined, logical user journey. If not, a more user-friendly option will outrank you.

• Sites that are search engine friendly are those that meet key accessibility guidelines. All text content should be marked-up to reflect its importance in a given page hierarchy (not just for style). Meanwhile, essential non-text elements like images, banners and even embedded files need to have text equivalents that search engines can actually read.

What makes your SEO ranking drop?

• Landing pages stuffed with keywords. We still hear stories of keyword stuffing and even find sites hiding keywords against a background of the same colour. This is a huge mistake that could get your site penalised.

• Pretty, unreadable images. A full bleed, full colour landing page is lovely, but can a search engine read it? Everything you want your users to see needs to be readable by a search engine too. This goes for every element, from banners to buttons.

• Black hat tactics. There are still so many SEO services out there promising huge, instant improvements for a fee. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Search engines know about these companies and being connected with them risks a ban that could take months to lift.

Track and tweak to improve your SEO

Like any other aspect of good website management, SEO requires vigilance. Once you have an SEO strategy in place, it’s important to keep tracking your performance so you can find any drop in rankings early and take steps to counter this.

We know how important it is that your site ranks first and how frustrating it is to be outranked by competitors.

For expert advice on reaching your SEO goals, get in touch with our team today.