1. Keyword Research

Start your SEO work with keyword research. If you don't know which keywords people are searching for you won't be able to optimise your site and your SEO efforts will be wasted.

There are many keyword research tools to choose from. One of the best places to start is the Google Keyword Planner.

One of the main goals of keyword research is to discover the terms and phrases that are most relevant to your market

Keywords with a high search volume may be good to target. But you also need to consider how competitive your phrases are. Keywords with a lot of competition will be harder to rank. Keywords with less competition will be easier to rank.

Once you know which keywords you want to rank for, create at least one page on your website for each keyword. Your page must contain high quality information based specifically on your chosen keyword. You should use similar and related terms as appropriate throughout your page content. Don't feel that you need to keep repeating your keyword over and over. Using the same keyword too often on a page could actually hurt your ranking efforts.

2. Content is King

One of the oldest SEO mantras which still holds true and probably always will. While other SEO factors wax and wane in popularity and effectiveness, good content is always a solid bet - and well written, authoritative content is virtually a pre-condition of long term success.

Create a Content Development Plan to help you with your web publishing efforts.

Publish new material on a regular basis to keep your content fresh.

Use the information from your keyword research to identify good topics to write about.

Create a mix of information including: latest news, what's happening elsewhere in your market, sales copy for your services and products, educational articles, in depth features and so on.

Presenting your content in different formats can also pay dividends. Written content can be supplemented with audio, video, slideshows, PDFs and so on.

3. Title Tags

Title tags are important for SEO and should be created for every page on your website.

Create individualised titles on a per page basis. Titles should be geared specifically around your page content and the main keyword you are targeting on that page.

The content of your title tag is displayed as the clickable link for entries which appear in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

To maximise the impact of your title within the SERPS don't use more than 65 characters - including punctuation and spacing.

Use you main keyword phrase up front within your title tag as the primary text.

4. Meta Tags

Meta tags provide additional information to the search engines about your website.

A large number of meta tags are available including: meta description, meta keyword, meta robots, meta author, meta language and many more.

The meta description tag should be completed for every page on your site. The meta description tag should provide a short summary of your page content.

Your meta description tag is often shown in the search engine results pages as the text snippet under the main link. For this reason you should take the time to craft a well-written and succinct description which appeals to human beings. A well written description can result in a higher click-through-rate to your website.

Where possible restrict your description to a maximum of around 150 characters. This is the typical cut off point for your description as it appears in the SERPS. If your description is too long it may be truncated - so it looks like you have been cut off in mid sentence ...

None of the other meta tags are important for SEO.

What do Google say about Meta Tags?

5. SEO Friendly URLs

A URL is simply the web address of your page. An SEO friendly URL is a web page which contains your keyword within its name.

For example: www.yourwebsite.com/your-keyword.html

Using your keywords within the structure of your URL helps the search engines understand what your page is about and may provide your page with an SEO boost. On a broader level, URLs structured in this way are also more user-friendly and may help to increase your click-through-rates from the search engines.

6. Keyword Rich Domain Names

For many years, webmasters have been able to maintain an edge over their competitors and rank higher for certain phrases by using Exact Match Domains (EMDs).

For example: www.yourkeyword.com

However, Google have recently updated their algorithm (September 2012) to ensure that this factor alone no longer provides an unfair advantage for search engine rankings.

Having keywords within your domain may still provide some SEO benefits as long as your site complies with Google's quality guidelines. However, it's important to remember that the domain name itself is no guarantee of ranking success. It's just one factor among others that can help you rank for your chosen keyword.

7. Validate your Code

A poorly coded website can negatively affect your search engine optimisation efforts and can also cause problems for your visitors. The easiest way to resolve such problems is to ensure you have a standards compliant website with valid code. You can test your code at the W3C website with their excellent code validation tool.

Validating your code on an existing site may not always be easy or even possible. If you're building a new site you should stipulate code validation as a precondition to your web designer.

8. Web Analytics

Web analytics are a vital part of the picture when it comes to understanding your website visitors and monitoring the performance of your site. With a web analytics package you can determine how many people visit your site, which keywords they use to find you, whether they came from a search engine, the average time spent on your site, the average number of pages visited and much more.

Google Analytics is by far the most popular web analytics programme. It's easy to set up an account and install the tracking code on your website, and it's free to use, so there's no excuse not to set up analytics for your site.

Without analytics it's not possible to tell how well your site is performing and you won't be able to measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.

9. Set up Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a service which provides additional information and statistics about your website. After you have verified your site you get access to a powerful dashboard with a range of tools and features which can help you to analyse and optimise your site. The following is a list of some of the things you can do with Google Webmaster Tools.

  • Submit an xml sitemap for more effective indexing
  • Check for crawl errors and find broken links
  • Check for malware on your site
  • Discover who is linking to your site
  • Find out information about your top keywords including impressions and click through rates
  • Find out if you can make any improvements to your title and meta tags
  • Check and set the crawl rate and view statistics about how Google accesses your site
  • Check your robots.txt file
  • Set a preferred domain which determines how the site URL is displayed in the SERPs

Google Webmaster Tools will also send you an email alert upon detection of any critical issues which may have an negative impact on the health or performance of your site.

10. Make your Site User-Friendly

Web usability is sometimes forgotten in discussions about SEO. But there are several good reasons why it makes sense to include usability as part of your SEO remit. Websites are first and foremost about users not robots. A well designed, user-friendly site will ensure that your site is perceived in a positive light by your visitors. This increases the likelihood of repeat visits, and encourages sharing, bookmarking, recommendations, likes and links. These social signals are picked up by the search engines and can contribute to higher rankings.

Good usability can also increase the time visitors spend on your website, foster trust in your brand, and lead to higher conversions.

11. Effective Header Tags

Header tags are used to create headlines on your web pages and help to provide structure to your page content. There are six header tags: <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and so on down to <h6>. You normally include the main headline for your page inside an <h1> tag, with additional sub-headlines inside <h2> tags.

Search engines pay particular attention to the text within header tags as they usually provide strong clues about the page theme and content. To maximise the SEO benefits of header tags try to include your main keyword within the <h1> tag and use related terms where appropriate within <h2> tags.

12. Create Good Internal Links

Search engine robots traverse and index the web by following links. The text included inside a link can help to highlight what sort of content is contained on the page being linked to. Accordingly, link text is seen as highly significant by the search engines and is an important factor for SEO. Here are some useful tips to bear in mind when creating links.

  • Always use meaningful and descriptive phrases within your link text.
  • Don't create links such as "click here" or "more information".
  • Where possible - and as long as it makes sense to do so - use your keywords within your link text.
  • Always think of your visitors first and use links to enhance site navigation and usability.

13. Optimise your Images

Alt tags are used to describe images on your web site. Search engines - and other programmes such as screen readers for blind and partially sighted visitors - cannot automatically understand the meaning of images. Imagine a banner image with a picture of a digital camera which includes the words "Cheap digital cameras for sale". A search engine will know that your page contains an image, but will not know what the image is about without some additional help. Including an alt tag with a description of your image will provide the information which the search engine needs. For example:

alt="Cheap digital cameras for sale"

Where appropriate, use your keywords within your alt tags, but don't resort to keyword stuffing, and always provide the most accurate description you can.

You can optimise your image further by giving it a descriptive name. In the case above for example, you could create an image called: cheap-digital-cameras-for-sale.jpg

Optimising your images as described above can help to boost your SEO efforts and may also help your images to rank in Google image searches.

14. Create a Sitemap

An easy way to ensure the search engines can access all the pages on your site is to create a sitemap. A sitemap is simply a page which lists - and links to - all the other pages on your site.

Provide a link to your sitemap from your front page, or include the link as part of your site navigation to ensure that it's accessible from all pages on your site.

Make sure that you update your sitemap when you remove old pages or add new pages to your site.

Sitemaps can also be a good navigational tool for your website visitors and therefore fulfill a dual purpose.

15. Local SEO

Many brick and mortar businesses operate in a specific geographical location. For example: restaurants, garages, locksmiths, plumbers, hairdressers, chiropodists and hundreds of other local businesses.

Local businesses should ensure that their websites are optimised for the most appropriate geographical keywords. For example: plumber Birmingham, locksmith Manchester, hairdresser Glasgow and so on.

  • Do the research to ensure you are targeting the best local keywords.
  • Include your full business address and contact details prominently on your website.
  • Include your business name and geographical keywords in your title and meta tags.
  • Include your listing on Google+ Local - formerly Google Places.
  • Add your site to local business directories.
  • Ensure that your business name and address appears correctly in any local business directories.
  • Encourage your clients and customers to provide reviews of your business, products and services on relevant review sites.
  • Provide a mobile friendly version of your website for local customers on the move.

16. Follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines

The Google Webmaster Guidelines provide a great deal of information which can help webmasters and site owners build and develop their websites with the confidence that they are doing so within the rules laid down by Google.

Google provide some very useful information about design, content, technical issues and quality. It's certainly worth paying close attention to the Google Quality Guidelines and ensure that you steer clear of the techniques described there including: auto-generated content, link schemes, cloaking, sneaky redirects, hidden text, hidden links, doorway pages, scraped content and more.