Sometimes, the little things get lost in SEO. This is particularly true if you are attempting to optimise your site yourself. Here are just ten tiny tips to remember when it comes to search engine optimisation:

1. Listen to your audience. Keyword research is as much about listening to searchers as it is about researching the industry. Your site’s users can provide you with information on keywords that you would never have thought of, including slang, misspellings and alternative terms. The help of an SEO company can be invaluable in keyword research. Contact our experts at SEO Consult when you want access to keyword resources.

2. Tidy titles. Keeping your title tags tidy is vital for your website itself as well as for your search engine optimisation. Not only search engines but users rely on them to know about your site. Any of your title tags could appear in the search engine results pages.

3. Remember keyword placement in your tags. It is thought that the placement of keywords within things like your title tag makes a big impact on the way the tag is interpreted by search engine spiders. Keep your most important keywords to the left.

4. Don’t skimp. Particularly with your important pages, your tags should be uniquely written to suit the page. Any repetition of tags could result in the page being marked as a supplemental page, meaning it won’t show up separately in the SERPs, and your search engine optimisation efforts for that page could be wasted.

5. Links alive. One of the basic tasks you should do regularly is to check that your links are functioning properly. There are tools for this, but the most straightforward way to do this is to go to your site and click on links. You can check that everything on your site appears as you want it to as well.

6. Don’t spam. This should go without saying, but unfortunately spam comes in many forms. It can be hard to tell what’s right and what’s wrong. Essentially, anything that doesn’t benefit your user is suspect. Using the same three keywords for every page on a ten-page site isn’t that helpful to your users, because the pages should have quite different content. It can also be seen as keyword stuffing by the search engines.

7. Let go. SEO is often about trial and error, particularly if you don’t have access to the tools and expertise of an SEO firm. Don’t get your heart set on a technique because you may need to change it.

8. Don’t worry. Search engine optimisation is an industry that has been created. All of its tools, terms and techniques are things that have come from observation of the organic way search engines work. It can be easy to get caught up in the technicalities when it comes to SEO, but if you concentrate on the quality of your site and the needs of your users, you’re less likely to make mistakes.

9. Paid advertising results are short-term. Advertising such as pay-per-click can be very helpful in increasing your traffic, but it’s important to remember that the increase will be short lived.

10. Play patience. SEO results take time but are long-term.

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