There’s plenty of work you can perform on your pages to appeal to the search engines. All sorts of fancy techniques have been devised by the clever minds of the SEO community. If you’re just starting out in SEO, it can all be very confusing. It’s best to stick with the basics, and luckily these are relatively well set out.

If you’re unfamiliar with search engine optimisation yet in desperate need for a good position in the search engines, it can help to get professional advice. It’s also vital to know the basics. These five points are the basics of SEO:

• Keyword research: This is the first, the most central, and sometimes the only affordable step of SEO when a business is trying to optimise on its own. Guessing at keywords is definitely not the way to go. Many SEO firms find that their clients are surprised at the results of keyword research, which often turns up words or phrases customers use but their business is unaware of. With the wide range of keyword tools available, there is no reason not to conduct keyword research of some sort, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult

• Architecture reorganisation. You can form the world’s most perfect keyword list, but it won’t have a chance to work if your site’s structure creates blocks for the search engine spiders. Search engines assume that the important information on your site is on your early pages, and tend not to crawl very deeply. When it comes to architecture, simple is best. This can be difficult to achieve if you have a large site, but re-categorisation of some pages will ensure that the most important pages are on clear paths. The important thing to remember is to keep pages as few clicks as possible from the main pages. Your internal links can also boost the SEO of your main pages, but this is more advanced SEO

• Focus. Choose how many keywords you want to rank for, assign them to pages, and optimise those pages with intense focus. An ideal situation for SEO is to build your pages around your keywords, but this isn’t always possible. Shifting the focus of your content onto your keywords is almost as good

• Incorporate keywords seamlessly. This is a lot harder than it seems. Many sites commit the grievous search engine crime of keyword stuffing simply through over-enthusiasm. It’s important to get used to using keyword phrases in place of ordinary descriptions, such as using ‘Smith Co’ instead of ‘our company’, but don’t go overboard. It can help to read the content of your competitors’ sites for guidance. Consult your SEO firm for help with content

• Be patient. Impatience has been the downfall of more than a few SEO campaigns, and is one of the mistakes made by newcomers. When you feel things aren’t working, it is tempting to fiddle with your SEO. This is often done before the SEO plan has had time to produce any results. Remember, SEO takes time and is best thought of as a continuous processE

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