With so many avenues to take to increase the potential of your site for SEO, it can be hard to choose. The SEO community is full of very loud voices, and each one is shouting their own version of the key to success. A large number of experts advise that a blog is best to pull in subscribers and boost your fresh content flow. Other experts push off-page techniques like social media marketing or link fostering. More still say you should concentrate on fine-tuning the traditional SEO areas of your pages. After a while, all of this advice can become overwhelming.

If you have the advice of a search engine optimisation expert on board, the choice is a little simpler. Reputable professionals will be able to plot out an SEO plan that suits your unique site, and you can talk to our experts at SEO Consult about SEO planning. It’s easy, though, to get bogged down in the hundreds of methods pushed at you when you’re an SEO newcomer. The key is to keep things in perspective.

No site can succeed if it follows the precepts of every SEO expert out there. This is not because the advice given by experts is bad, but because search engine optimisation must be a subtle mix of the right kind of techniques for a site. Stuffing your site with bells and whistles will have almost as bad an effect as stuffing it with keywords. Users are sensitive to the techniques of SEO. A site that features a regular blog, videos, press releases, hypertext, bolded and italicised words in content, navigation sidebars, navigation footers, navigation headers, sitemaps, complex internal links… well, you get the idea. Such a site comes off as messy rather than optimised, and all of this will eventually affect its ranking.

So, what should you do? Your SEO needs to stick to the techniques that will suit the tone of your site. If your target users can be found on Twitter, by all means pursue them. If they’ve never heard of it before, tweeting is a waste of your resources. If your users are informed professionals then videos on ‘how to’ subjects won’t be very attractive to them.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pursue new audiences for your site. One of the aims of SEO is to provide more traffic for your site, and many techniques can open up new avenues toward different groups of users. It is important, however, to build on what you have, rather than trying to start from scratch. For example, adding a forum is likely to attract more users if your site is aimed at informed professionals. Adding educational articles will have less of an effect, unless you can establish yourself as an authority. The most successful SEO campaigns build on what a site already has, using natural assets to encourage user retention and eventually grow the business.

There is no trick to perfect SEO. Your site’s success will rely on skilful SEO implementation and faithfulness to your site’s aims.

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