Bonus Episode - All 101 Quick SEO Tips Compilation Megapod.

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hi, it's Ed here. Welcome to this bonus episode.

This is not in the normal schedule of things. This is just where I've spotted recently. The last month, I did 10 episodes of 101 quick SEO tips. Each episode having 10 tips in it lasted about 10 minutes. I've spotted this been really, really popular and I've seen people downloading one after the other after they're listening to them all in order. Um, we can see it from the stats. So we just thought you know, let's make one podcast with all the tips in. So this is a compilation episode. This is taken. You know, we've cut the tips out from all of the episodes and just put them all into one, so this is a lot longer than most of my normal episodes. My normal episode is normally 10 to 15 minutes. I like to normally keep them short and actionable, um, but I think just seeing how people are listening to these ones, it's worth putting into one podcast. And it's also so I can easily share just the one podcast with people who want to listen to all the tips in one order. And just before we get into it, just want to mention you can get a written pdf version of all these 101 tips. There's links in the show notes on where to go to get that. Yeah, it's really good, got it all in one place, good for reference. So, yeah, do go and get that. So that's the end of my little intro. Let's go straight.

Tips, okay, let's start with tip number one, and this is make your website as fast as possible, because google hates sites that load slowly, and so do your users. So think about it yourself. You don't want to be using a website that's slow, takes a long time to load pages. Google knows that people hate that and it doesn't like promoting websites that are slow. Takes a long time to load pages. Google knows that people hate that and it doesn't like promoting websites that are slow. So always make your website as fast as possible, okay.

Tip number two google can't find a page. It can't index it, so make sure new pages are linked to from existing pages. You need to make it easy for google and your site visitors to find pages, so every new page you add must be linked from the most obviously related page. Google will thank you and your visitors will thank you. So always remember you know, always make sure every page that you create is linked to. If you create a page and don't link to it, then Google's not going to find it and people aren't going to find it, so you've just wasted your time. So obviously, always think carefully about where you're going to link to a page from. Make sure it's relevant. There might be more than one place to link to it from, you know. Make sure it goes in the right place in your navigation. And also, if you've got other relevant pages where you could reference this new page, then link to it from there as well. That internal linking is really important.

Tip number three google loves secure sites, so always have your site running on HTTPS. Now you'll see nowadays pretty much every single site and you wouldn't want to share your personal information with a site that wasn't encrypted, so why should you expect anyone else to use your site if it wasn't secure? So do yourself a favour make sure your site is running on HTTPS. Your visitors and Google will appreciate it. Many hosts will sort this out for you, but just be sure that it is on HTTPS. Otherwise, you know it's one of those issues where Google isn't going to favour it and you're going to get warnings in people's browsers when they try and come to your site. It's just not good for you at all. So just make sure that's one of the things that you always sort out from scratch. Tip number four Despite what some people say, backlinks from other websites help you rank better.

This is because Google sees them like votes for your content. So the more links from legitimate third-party websites, the better. But a word of warning here Google doesn't like people buying backlinks. If it thinks you're doing this, it may penalize your website. So don't get tempted by people offering easy links in return for payment. There are genuine link building programs. There are genuine link building methods that are white hat and aren't going to get you in trouble. But this is just a word of caution when you first look in. Be careful if you do go looking to buy links on what kind of methods they're using and whether it's white hat and fits within Google's profiles, google's terms of service, or whether it goes against them. Tip number five another backlink one Backlinks coming from external sites and pages that are more relevant to your website's topic are better than from completely unrelated sites.

Relevancy doesn't mean a website has to be exactly the same topic as yours, just that they're linking to you from a page that's relevant to their topic and also relevant to you. So an example might be you might have a campsites website having a page about local places for their visitors to eat at and linking to local restaurants and cafes. So there's a relevance there because it's relevant to their audience, it's relevant to the area and they're giving you that link. So that is a good, relevant link. Links from completely unrelated sites on pages which are completely unrelated to your topic ie if you were just inserting links into a page just to try and get page rank from that page by the link being there isn't going to perform as well as a link from a site that's on the same topic and a page that's the same topic as you are.

Tip number six h1s are important. Every page should have one. Put the main keywords you want to rank a page that's the same topic as you are. Tip number six H1s are important. Every page should have one. Put the main keywords you want to rank a page for in the page's H1. So on a web page, the H1 is the main heading of the page content. So in a CMS like WordPress, it'll be the page or post heading. Most web page editors might also call it the heading one. So H1 is a HTML tag that helps Google work out what the subject of your page is, as well as being helpful for your site visitors and accessibility for those using screen readers. Now, changing a H1 can have a big difference. We recently had one on keywords people use where the H1 for one of our pages is a page that targets Google autocomplete. We'd put it as keyword autocomplete for some reason and we were ranking around about position 30 for the term Google autocomplete tool. We changed the H1 to Google autocomplete tool. Two, three weeks later we were ranking almost on page one and that ranking is still going to climb because we just sorted out that H1. We would not put a good H1 in to start with and it causes issues, so always make sure you've got a good H1 for your page that's relevant to the topic of your page and what you're trying to rank for.

Tip seven page titles are important. It should be descriptive of the page content and include the keywords you want the page to rank for. Google uses the page title as one of the most important features to work out what the subject of your page is. Your page title is also what Google will often use to display in the search results when it lists your page, though sometimes it will create its own title, which can be annoying, but it's best to put in what you prefer. Your potential site was to see, because some of the time Google will use that. This is very similar to tip six about h1s. I genuinely you're going to have very similar h1s and page titles and because these these are the big signifier to google about what your page subject is about and also to your readers. And again, with the page title, because it is often used by google and in the search results, it's a good place to make sure you get a good title that's going to be attractive for people to click on.

Tip eight internal links Links from pages within your site to each other. They help provide context to Google about what your pages are about. So use them to help boost the rankings of your pages for your target keywords. You want to use anchor text that describes the content of the page you're linking to. This anchor text provides an additional signal to Google as to what the page is about and what keywords it should be ranking for. And, in addition, good internal links help your site visitors discover more of your content. So this is I always say to people look at Wikipedia for how they do internal linking, because it's actually really good practice. They link well between different pages. They link well on terms. If there's something you might not understand in a page and it's referenced elsewhere where there's a good explanation, they link to it. It's just really good to link your pages together well. It's a very important ranking signal and it's also very important for your users to be able to find their way around the site, so don't neglect them. Basically, too many people don't put enough internal links on their web pages.

Tip nine People who go to Google are looking to answer a question. To build a successful website, you need to aim to answer people's questions. You need to build your content strategy around discovering and answering the questions your audience has. You'll create great content that actually helps people and will naturally cover a huge variety of keywords across your topical area and a great place to find actual questions. Real people are asking online for any topic or our tools that keywords people use is all set up completely around this philosophy of answering questions and building your content around the questions people ask and whereabout Keywords People Use is all about finding those questions people are asking online so you can make sure to cover your topic based on real users questions. So that's a really important tip.

Tip number 10 seo changes a lot over time. Always check that advice is still relevant now. Over the years, google and other search engines have made several changes as to what they deem important for web ranking. They regularly implement entirely ranking systems and algorithms and that can change what is and isn't important for ranking over time. Therefore, you need to be really careful when looking at any SEO advice. Look at how many sources are confirming any advice you're receiving and how old any published advice is. Reading an SEO guide that's not been updated for several years might lead you to following outdated advice. So it's really key to stay on top of the changes in the industry changes that Google make and just stay on top of the advice and just make sure that anything you're listening to is fresh, because you know some people are still regurgitating old tips from years ago that no longer work. Things have been deprecated, and but because it becomes perceived received wisdom, then people don't go back and check that these things still work. But so that's why it's really important to always stay on top of the latest advice.

So, tip 11 make sure some content um on your website is evergreen content that doesn't go out of date quickly and can generate traffic for a long period of time. So the very best content from a return on investment point of view is that which stands the test of time without the need for a great deal of updating or refreshing, and this kind of content will cover topics that people come back to again and again or which is consistently bringing new people to them. So, for example, there's always people becoming new parents for the first time. That's a guaranteed refreshing audience who will have the same questions over and over again, and that's a great topic for evergreen content. On broadbandcouk, we had loads of evergreen content the Beginner's Guide to Broadband, which I wrote the first version of back in 2004. So that's 20 years old now and that piece of content is still on that website today. Yes, it's had refreshes over time, but the actual um you know piece of content is evergreen. There's always going to be people with beginner questions on broadband and that is there to attract them in and that has generated countless hundreds of thousands, if not more, of visits over those 20 years. So that's a great return on investment on that piece of content.

Tip 12 with a new website, target long-tail traffic to start with, you'll start to build rankings and traffic faster this way. Grow your content in your authority over time. So it's just a fact that with a brand new website, unless you're targeting a very, very specific and underserved niche, then you have a hard time ranking for high traffic popular terms, to the point that it's just really not worth trying. But that's not to say that you shouldn't enter a popular topic, but you should target long tail keywords which you could cover in better depth than anyone else. So then over time you'll build a body of content and authority that will start to enable you to start targeting and ranking for high-traffic keywords. Essentially, you've got to build a base of content that starts to build a pyramid from that long-tail content at the bottom up to the head terms at the top which get all the traffic and big, the big, heavy head terms. Now, head terms are great in terms of the amount of traffic they produce, but it's very varied what the intent of that traffic is. So it's very hard to actually do, especially if you're trying to monetize people by affiliate sales or via direct sales. That gets great if you're just doing display advertising, but not great for too much anything else. And it's also really hard to compete for those keywords because you need a real, real authority site with lots of history for Google to reward you with those head terms. That's where it makes much more sense to go long tail to go to the bottom, because there's so many more keywords there that you can target, there's going to be less competition in each of them. So if you just start targeting key ones really well, that's how you'll start to build that traffic, build reputation with Google and over time, as you build up, you'll start ranking naturally for those head terms.

So tip 13, one of the greatest SEO skills is patience. Building out content and traffic takes time. Patience will be rewarded eventually and most people who start websites or indeed almost any endeavor will fail because they don't give it enough time to work. This doesn't necessarily mean you have to be constantly working on a site. Rather, just having the patience to build out an initial site and then leave it for a while Sometimes maybe even a year or more to pick up some links and traffic before starting to work back on it later. Can't rush it.

Just rushing at creating websites isn't necessarily always the best way. It takes time for Google to start to reward you. Part of it is, I think, there's longevity in there. You need to build up history with it and you know, sometimes you just need to be patient. You know, just waiting is what can bring them the most rewards over time.

I've seen lots of people who start websites and then give up really quickly. They get bored, they don't see any immediate movement and then they just stop. The people I've seen who are successful are those that start a website and continue plodding on at it. They might not be doing huge numbers of pages and new content weekly, but they keep at it over time and over time and over time and slowly build and slowly build, and over time they will get those rewards. So it's patience is what you need.

Tip four the best time to start a website was 20 years ago. The second best time is now Get started. Any website that isn't started and remains just an idea in your head is not going anywhere or going to achieve anything. Every successful site you see today was started by scratch by somebody someday in the past. So you need to get started today, not tomorrow, not in a week or a month, but today. This is just a simple fact of life. Everybody starts from scratch. The best time to start is now. Get on it.

Tip 15, familiarise yourself with Google spam policies so you don't get yourself penalised for doing something they don't like. It breaks my heart every time I see a website owner complain they've got penalised by google for following and implementing an seo tactic that turned out to be against google spam policies. Google's very clear on what tactics they consider against their rules, so make sure you read them and keep up to date with them as they change over time. You really have no one to blame but yourself if you cross their lines and get penalized now if you want to cross the lines, if you want to do that and you know you're crossing the lines, then fine, knock yourself out. That's brilliant. But I'm just so concerned the amount of people who are giving out advice online on youtube and on places like that, where they're just saying people do this to rank, but they don't tell people that what they're suggesting them for them to do is against google's terms of service. So you need to be have your eyes open, you need to know what's going on. So just familiarize yourself with google spam policies just google spam policies and you'll find them very clear, very easy to read. No, you need no technical jargon, anyone can understand them, just do it.

Tip 16 don't scrimp on web hosting. Always pay for decent, fast and reliable hosting. Now this goes back to tip one in a previous episode. As well as wanting your hosting to be fast, google also wants sites to be reliable. It doesn't want to be sending people to a website that's offline for any reason. So you want your hosting to be as reliable as you can afford. Google accepts that every website will occasionally have downtime. You know even Twitter, bbc News, news all of them occasionally go down. But if your website is down often or for extended periods, then it will start to affect your rankings. Google will start to just demote you. If they can't trust it's going to be there. It's also bad for your users people who come to a site and find it's not there. They're just never going to come back. So you know, get good, reliable hosting.

Tip 17 make sure your website is backed up or hosted on a surface that provides auto backups. If something disastrous happens, you need to be able to recover it. It's the nightmare situation if any website is losing all the hard work you put into creating and building that website because of an unrecoverable server error or software error. You absolutely must ensure your website's backed up regularly and they have a plan in place to recover if the very worst happens. Lots of services will do this for you. Just make sure that when you're buying the service, that this is included and if it's not included, that you know what you're doing. You might be very technical, complete tits on yourself, but if not, make sure that you know you're happy, if something goes wrong like this, that your hosting provider can recover it all for you.

Tip 18 sign up for seo newsletters to stay up to date with news and updates. As I covered in tip 10 in a previous episode, seo tactics change a lot over time. It's a must to stay up to date with new developments, and a great way to do this is to sign up to seo newsletters. They're published by a number of seo experts, industry comment commentators perfect for staying in touch with latest news and views every week. Just Google SEO newsletters. You'll find a lot of people doing them. Sign up for a few and just keep an eye on them every week for these changes that come in.

Tip 19, listen to SEO podcasts to hear stories of how different people use SEO to build audiences and businesses. Now, I'm a great source of both learning and inspiration, and there are a lot of great other SEOs as well and related disciplines doing podcasts out there. I'd strongly suggest you search to find some that you enjoy listening to, and obviously listening to this one. That's a great start, but there are others out there. I don't say just listen to me. Listen to plenty of others, too, and you've made a great start by listening to this one, though.

And tip 20, think about how you monetize your site. Options include affiliate marketing, display advertising, digital products, e-commerce and many more. Pay used to start thinking about how you monetize at the planning stages of building a site, even if you don't plan to monetize at the start, because different monetization strategies need different functionalities to be considered. So an e-commerce site needs product catalogs, user accounts, payment gateways and all that kind of thing, whereas a site where you're just going to concentrate on display advertising is much simpler. You'll probably never need any of those things. So it might affect what platform you choose to start with. So, just at the very start, do have a good think about what your longer-term plans are for you then to choose what platform you're going to base your initial website on.

So number 21, need help. You can hire specialists quickly and easily, and usually affordably, on marketplaces like upworkcom. Finding a specialist for any task is now incredibly simple with these job marketplaces that are available. Don't let a skill gap keep you from achieving what you want. Go to place like upworkcom, put in what it is that you want to achieve a problem you're having and you'll get people from all around the world who will bid to complete that task for you and you can find any specialists, not just technical. Pretty much anything you want you can find there. So if there's anything you're stuck with, anything you're struggling with, that's where to go. Go to a place like Upwork and hire someone and it's all protected. It's a really good system. So, yeah, never struggle If you get stuck, go and find somebody.

Tip 22, looking to launch an e-commerce store but don't know where to start? Try Shopifycom. Shopify is a great hosted e-commerce platform which will get you up and running extremely quickly. There's no need to worry about hosting, software installs or updates. No tech skills are required at all. No excuses not to get going. It's basically an online hosted platform that specializes in doing e-commerce. It's got all the payment gateways in there. It just gets you from in so quickly you you can start um getting products on there and get content on there and get selling really quickly. Um, and you know it's cheap to start cheap monthly plans. It's used by a huge range of companies. There's companies selling millions and millions of pounds worth of um product every month you shopify. So it's a really solid platform. Um, they get better in terms of srv every year. There are there are some um trade-offs with all these things, but it's a really good platform to get started um. And yeah, highly recommended.

Tip 23 you want to launch a blog but you don't know where to start. So, as shopify is to e-commerce in, tip 22.com allows you to get a blog up and running without need to get your own hosting or install, update any software really quickly. I mean wordpress for blogging is basically just the default. I mean over 40 of the websites online worldwide run on wordpress, so you can either download and install and run it yourself or there's plenty of other places that run it. Wordpresscom is like a really good place to to start with and you know wordpress can be extended with plugins in so many ways. It's really good if you want to start a blog or in many other types of websites, there's welcome on wordpress, so it's well worth it. Up. Tip 24 e-commerce store owners always includes an faq for every product and product range to boost your organic traffic reach.

You don't want you to be just the place to buy a product. You want to be the expert on every product you sell and you'll attract more search traffic by answering all the potential questions. A prospective buyer has meaning more potential customers landing on your pages. Having all those questions answered there on the product page will also convert more visitors into buyers. So you're going to pick up people higher in the funnel, those who are thinking about purchasing a product. They're going to find you as the first source of information on that. So even if they don't buy there and then you are the place that's first going to come to mind when they do move on to buy, and if you do get on there and answer their questions for them, then you are more likely to make that sale. You don't want to be the e-commerce site that just sells something. Because people are going to come along, they might have a question about the product before they buy. They'll Google it, find somewhere else, answer the question and if that place also sells it, they may well buy it there as well. So you don't want to be hijacked by not having those questions answered on your page. Again, you're looking to find what people are asking about any product or any product range. Keywordspeopleusecom great place to find. Put in the product that you are selling and you'll find. We can provide you all the questions people are asking about that product.

Tip 25, a picture is worth 10,000 words. You can include images within your pages then do I mean? This is just such a simple tip, but so many people miss out on it? Put pictures and images on your pages where it makes sense If you're trying to explain to somebody how to use a piece of software. Put images up that show where on the page they've got to click. If you're selling a product, make sure you've got plenty of product images. The more product images, the better product images of the product in use a whole gamut, just make sure if you can fit an image in and it makes sense, do it.

Tip 26 decided to remove some old pages from your site. Always 301 redirect them to the next most suitable page. A 301 redirect it will pass any links that point to the remove page to the redirected page. Google will then pass most of the ranking signals of your old page to the page you redirect the traffic to, which means the hard work and effort you put into the page you've had to remove won't be completely lost from an seo perspective. Now a simple example of this is a product page. You've got your e-commerce site. You're selling a product. That product gets discontinued. Then you want to 301 redirect that product page back up to the category page that that product is part of. Or if a new version is released, 301 to the new version of that product is part of. Or if a new version is released, 301 to the new version of the product. Just make sure you don't lose all the hard work that you've put into that page and building rankings for it and traffic to it and links to it over time. Make sure that you redirect to another page so you don't lose it.

Tip 27, don't buy a domain name that includes the trademark of another company, especially bigger companies. You'll end up in a world of pain if you try to monetize it. Trying to benefit from another person's brand or trademark can be seen as an attempt to pass off and can lead to some quite serious legal consequences if the other company discovers what you're doing. Many brands can be quite aggressive at protecting their trademarks and brands and there are many examples of them getting those passing off shut down and the domain seized. In short, it's better to build your own brand from the start. So just don't don't. You know, if you're going to build a website about, you know, lego. Don't put lego in the domain name. And if you do, you know there's very strict rules on what you can and can't use with trademarks and some companies, especially the bigger ones, are very, very on top of this and will try and shoot you down. So don't step on people's toes with that. It's just not worth the effort from the start.

Tip 28 keywords in the domain name won't help you rank by themselves, but when people link to you using your domain name as anchor text, then it might. I mean, this is one of the more controversial tips you might find. Some people have quite strong opinions both for and against this tip. In my opinion, it's the keyword in the anchor text when people link with the domain name to you. That's the benefit though. I mean, when we had broadbandcouk, we got lots of links to that website which we were just broadbandcouk. We got lots of links to that website which we would just broadbandcouk. That was straight, you know, naked, naked um anchor text and I'm sure that helps that site rank for the um the keyword broadband, because that um keyword being the domain. It's not because it's just the domain itself. Pretty sure it's because the anchor text.

Some people think that um keywords and domain names do have power in themselves. Google seems to always now say say it doesn't you know. And if it is, it's you know, it's only going to help you for one keyword. But I don't think it hurts um to put them in. But I don't think it's a beat on end of tip 29 if the anchor text for a link says cheap laptops, then this is a sign to Google that the page being linked to is relevant for the term cheap laptops. This is why, when you create links that you control, you should always try and use descriptive anchor text rather than generic ones like click here, which are a race to a good ranking signal. Always make sure that when you put in links say, if you're using internal links that you control make sure that you use descriptive ones with the keywords in that you want to rank for, because Google does use the relevance of those anchor texts to help rank your website, the webpage, for those keywords that are in those anchor texts.

Tip 30, keyword volume is an overrated metric, which is why we don't use it at keywordspeopleusecom. Don't chase keywords based on volume. 20% of all searches every day on Google have never been seen before. Too many people get fixated on chasing keywords by volume, so all they're doing is making life hard for themselves, in the first instance, because more volume equals greater competition. So when you're starting out, it makes much more sense to chase fewer longer tail keywords that naturally have lower volume. It's only by building a broad base of content at this level that over time you'll start to gain the topical authority you need to naturally start and pick up higher volume keyword traffic. You know, with all the people also ask questions that we surface from google, if you put those into a tool that gives keyword volume, they will most likely say that those are zero volume keywords. But we know they're not zero volume keywords because Google bases those. People also ask questions based on the volume of questions it gets asked around those topics. So it only shows you high volume questions for that topic. So it only shows you high volume questions for that topic. The trouble is that the keyword volume estimators have got very sparse data on the long tail. They have some data about the head terms and further down, but at a certain point they just don't know and especially as so many keywords and queries are new every day, they just don't know, they can't guess. So don't get too hung up on keyword volume because you'll just miss out on so much opportunity if that's all you focus on tip number 31.

Use google search console to get insights on how your site is indexed by google and what keywords are driving your traffic. Google search console, or gsc for short, is a fantastic resource that google provides to website owners for free. All you need to do is follow their simple steps to verify your ownership of domain and away you go. So if you go to Google, just Google, google Search Console, you'll find a link there and you know if you're not using it already, get your sites registered in there. Within Google Search Console, there's a load of information that gives you performance on how many times you're getting impressions in search, how many clicks you're getting from search, what your click-through rate is. As indexing information, you can submit site maps there. It will give you information on page experience, things like core vitals. You can also find out if you've been hit with a manual action, if you've done anything wrong, got a manual penalty. There there's information on links. There's a whole load of stuff. It's incredibly valuable and if you're not using it, I really strongly suggest that you get signed up and start using that straight away.

Tip 32, get analytics set up on your website so you can see how many people use your site and how they use it. Now, without an analytics package, you're blind to is how many visitors you're attracting to your site from what sources. Analytics will allow you to see which of your content is performing well and how, over time, it gains or loses traffic. You can't manage what you can't measure, so you need to get some analytics set up Now. This is over and above what you get from Google Search Console, which is in tip 31, because Google Search Console will tell you about google traffic search traffic that's coming to you. It won't tell you traffic coming direct, won't tell you traffic coming from um link clicks from other websites, and won't tell you anything about stuff coming from advertising. So you need a further analytics package set up so you can see all the extra detail.

Tip 33 want to know when new people also ask questions appear on google for your topic, brand or keywords? Then use our search alert tool to be kept up to date. Now. This is the search alert functionality at keywordspeopleusecom and it allows you to set seed keywords that will watch automatically. In Google, people also ask for you, so when new questions start to surface, we'll automatically save them for you and let you know via email so you'll never miss a chance to jump on training topics. It's a really valuable tool. It means you'll never miss out and it can also, as it creates a history of what it finds over time, you can see as um questions surface, rise and then fall and then maybe resurface again in the future. You can start to see how um some questions are um seasonal, but it also will bring you on to trending topics, so it's really, really useful.

Tip 34, it's better to start than to be perfect. Launch fast and improve over time. Now, this is a real key principle for me. If you wait till you have something absolutely perfect, then you'll never get anything finished to the point that you're ready to launch it. You need to start quickly, get something going and then come back and improve it. When I started this podcast, it was nowhere near perfect. It probably still isn't now, but I do know I've improved over time and I will keep improving the more I produce. But if I was waiting to be perfect, I never would have launched. Most people never get anywhere because they just never start. Don't be most people. Give yourself permission to be rubbish to start with and just get on with it. You won't regret it.

Tip 35. Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a day, yet underestimate what they can achieve in a year. Keep at it. This is another one of my key principles and I use it to keep myself motivated. It can seem like a real slog on a day-to-day basis to get things done, and it often seems like you get less done by the end of the day than you just hope. However, if you look back over a longer period of time, like a year, then you'll realize you actually got more done than you would have guessed possible before you started. The key is to keep going and rack up achievements over time. It's like with this podcast. I started it just over eight months ago and I've now produced over 100 episodes. Yet the first episode took so long to create because it was the first time. You've just got to keep plugging away and you'll soon rack up a huge amount of work that you wouldn't have realized you could achieve in in the space that you do if you look at it on a micro level. So just always look for the long term, look at the bigger picture and keep planning.

On Tip 36, finding content ideas on your own is hard. Try using our Google AutoComplete search for a topic to find lots of ideas that match what real people are searching for Now. Blank page syndrome is hard to beat by yourself. You need inspiration and that's why I found a keyword people use is to help people beat that blank page syndrome problem, google. That's why I founded Keywords People Use is to help people beat that blank page syndrome problem. Google autocomplete is a really good search to use to take the guesswork out of deciding what to cover for a topic, because it gives you a whole wide range of seed keywords that work really well to then put into people. So I have to get the deep dive questions, but that autocomplete search is really valuable for giving you that inspiration and giving you ideas on where to start with content.

Tip 37. Been hit by a Google update? Don't panic. My biggest tip is to do absolutely nothing for at least two weeks. Google updates take a while to roll through and traffic levels can vary a lot for quite a while. So wait until the dust has settled before making any decisions. I mean Google is actually getting better now at announcing when their major updates are taking place and, crucially, when they've finished rolling out.

Always wait until an update is completely rolled out before even trying to start making sense of what has happened. I mean, I've seen on so many occasions sites take big hits at the start of updates but then they recover before the end. It's tough having to wait, and anyone that's had seen the recent march core updates, which actually took till nearly the end of april to finish, I know it's hard to sit there and wait, but if you start trying to make changes while an update's rolling through, you might actually yourself more harm than good and never be able to understand what on your site has been hit and what hasn't. So you know, you just need to be patient. Tip 38 when google pre-announce an update, don't try and guess what's going to happen and make changes in advance. Wait to see what actually happens first. Now, occasionally google will pre-announce an update, but even if it sounds like that announcement is going to hit your site, it's usually best to wait for the update before making changes in advance. The only time this isn't the case is when they're very specific about wax and they're going to be taking action on so the updates that came out on May 5th, google were very, very upfront about what they were going to have to do after that parasite content and people sort of abusing site authority to rank unrelated stuff like voucher codes and things like that. They give very specific examples of what they're going for, but in the past we've seen other sites where they were saying I think there was a first helpful content update and they announced that was coming. Some people started deleting pages of their sites in advance, but it was like you don't know, you haven't got enough information to know what action to take, so wait for it to roll through before you take action.

Tip 39, fed up of Google Analytics 4, ga4, I use clickycom as well for an easy overview of analytics. I mean, I've got to admit I miss the old Google Analytics. It was, you know. It was much more accurate and easy to use compared to GA4. I do have GA4 on all my sites, but I very rarely venture in there nowadays. I use clicky to keep an eye on day-to-day and real-time traffic. It's amazing for keeping tabs on how things are performing, gives you real-time numbers and you can see it tracking through the day. You have a lag for things to come through and you can very quickly see what people are coming, where they're coming from, what pages they're going to on the site with a real quick overview. It's really really nice. It's really really cheap. It's less than $20 a month for up to 100 sites. I think there are free options as well, so completely recommend clickycom. Tip 40 sites suddenly disappeared from google.

Make sure your robotstxt file hasn't been accidentally set to block googlebot and other web crawlers. I mean this is a somewhat frequent seo cook-up that I've seen many sites make over the years. I think I've probably done it myself, bound to do it myself over the time. It's probably the most common way this happens is when the robotstxt is for a staging site and a staging site is a copy of a live website where new developments are tested, which has a robotstxt on it that blocks Google, as you don't want to get your staging site indexed as well as your live site. If that robotstxt which blocks google accidentally gets copied across to your live site when a new site update is released, then all of a sudden you've got a robotstxt that's telling google to not index your site and you can just disappear overnight. So always check your live sites robotstxt when releasing code from staging to live servers. You shouldn't be sending it across, but I've seen it happen and you know. If you don't have a staging site, don't worry about this. But even if you, you know, ever do, just disappear, just make sure you've not clicked the button or made a change somewhere that has set your robotstxt to block you, because that's going to be the first thing to always check. Your site just suddenly disappears.

Tip 40. Have your site use either wwwdomaincom or just domaincom and three or one redirect one to the other. Don't have the site available on both. This is because, technically, if you have your website being served from both the www and the non-www version, then you are duplicating every web page and it can cause some issues for google and deciding which version of the page it should index. It just avoids all potential problems if you just choose one that you want to be indexed and make sure any requests through the version are 301 redirected. It doesn't matter which one you choose. On keywordspeopleusecom we use just keywordspeopleusecom. If you went to wwwkeywordspeopleusecom then you will be 301 redirected to keywordspeopleusecom. On broadbandcouk, we actually had it on wwwbroadbandcouk. If you went to just straight broadbandcouk, it would 301 redirect you to www. Just pick one and stick with it. Tip 42.

Seo is often more of an art than a science. You'll see lots of conflicting advice out there. Look for consensus Now. If you spend enough time within the SEO community, you'll find that while we can agree on some things most of the time, there are lots of other things where agreement is hard to find. At the end of the day, you've just got to consume SEO content widely and try your own experiments and build your own experience.

It's often I see people out there saying things that I disagree with, um, and you know, sometimes it's vehemently disagree with, but sometimes it's just like on the edges. You know, some people say things like, oh yeah, these backlinks don't matter as much anymore, and other people will be like no, actually backlinks are just as important as ever. You know, what you need to do with all of these things is just see what the consensus is and even then go with your own experience as well. If there's something you can test, something you can try, then do it. Um, there was one recently I did with, you know, people saying h1s don't count anymore, but I did a little thing where I changed some H1s on keywords people use and we saw rankings jump almost overnight for those keywords that we were targeting with those H1s. So that's just me. People are saying H1s don't count anymore. I don't know what they're talking about. So that's what I'm saying. It's an art. The rules change all the time and no one really knows the full rules because Google keeps their cards close to their chest. So always just look for consensus and try things yourself.

Tip 43, nothing beats experimenting when it comes to SEO. Always try testing things and be ready to roll it back if things don't work. Now this goes back to what I said in tip 42. You'll always be asking yourself what if, unless you try things, treat everything you do as an experiment. Just in tip 42, you know you'll always be asking yourself what if, unless you try things, treat everything you do as an experiment, measure the results for each experiment and decide whether to keep and move forward or roll back and try a different experiment. So, like I said, when I just tried the h1 the h1 changes on keywords people use you know that proved to me. It worked. We saw the change. It was worth keeping. Other times you might make a change and you'll see your ranking slide, you know, and you don't be afraid to. You know, reverse what you did and roll back and go back to how things were and see if that brings you back up again. You know you you've got to experiment, otherwise you won't learn.

Tip 44 there's no ideal keyword ratio for content, as is sometimes also referred to as keyword density. If you come across someone talking about keyword density or ratios as something you need to pay attention to, then my advice is to be very, very wary about any other advice that person gives. The very, very basic search engines of 30 years ago did in some cases look at keyword and they were very basic. The more a keyword is mentioned on a page, the more likely that that page is to be the best result for this keyword. But obviously it's so easy to game that it became something that you could just repeat the keyword over and over and over again and putting it at the foot of the page over and over and over again to force your way to the top. But again you could easily be why does someone do it? I did more in and you know these things just don't work anymore. Search engines are so much more sophisticated, so don't worry about keyword density. It just isn't a thing anymore.

Tip 45 there is no ideal length for an article. It needs to be as long or as short as it needs to be to cover the topic of the page. I mean this is another seo myth that there is a minimum or a maximum or an ideal length for articles on a website. You know, just make any page or piece of content as long as it needs to be to cover what you want to achieve on that page. If you've got across everything you need to get across, then that's the right length. Don't pad it out with fluff, don't take away things that need to be there just to make something shorter. Just get the content to say what you need it to say and stop. That's it. Tip 46, doing a site migration.

Most important thing you can do, if possible, is to keep page URLs the same. If not, then make sure all of those URLs are 301 redirected to the new URLs. Now, if you change your page's URL, then Google will consider it to be a brand new page, even if the content stays the same as on the original URL. Now, if you change your page's URL, then Google will consider it to be a brand new page, even if the content stays the same as on the original URL. This means that the page is starting from scratch again in terms of rankings. This is why, ideally, you need to keep the URLs the same, even if you've moved platforms. If, for some reason, you can't keep the URL the same, then the next best thing to do is 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL to let Google know that the change has happened and to pass ranking signals to the new URL.

We did this on broadbandcouk back in the late 2000s. The original site was set up in Java Java server pages, which I need to very rarely see anymore and we had lots of pages that ended in jsp. We moved to a PHP platform back then and we decided we need to make all our pages no longer have the file name on the end for whatever programming language it's in. That was way common back in the past to have those phps on there as those jsps or whatever. We moved them to have nothing on the URL when we moved across and we had to 301 redirect those urls um to the new urls which didn't have those endings on. Now. That made it much easier in the future when we moved. We further moved to another platform later on in the future we could just keep the url patterns the same. So it's times like that when you need to think about how you do on migration and ideally go for URLs which are easy to 301 cross-platforms in the future, because you never know when you're going to need to change them.

Tip 47, don't worry about bounce rate Some of my affiliate sites. I want people to bounce off to a merchant as quickly as possible. Bouncing back to Google SERPs, however, might be a different answer. Now, bouncing forward from your web page to another page on your site or a third-party site you're linking to is not a bad thing. It's often what you want people to do and it shows you helping people get where they want to be. Quickly bouncing back from your site to the Google SERPs, though, could have been seen as a negative signal, as, in your page, didn't satisfy the user's intent, so they've got to go back to google to try another link. You know, if my opinion is, if, if you, if you send people, if people sorry, if google send people to you and then you don't, they don't go back to google on that same question it means you've satisfied their intent, you've been helpful, and it doesn't matter if they move to another page on your site or another page on another website. You've set them on the right path, you're the right path and get them on their journey to somewhere else, and that's not going to be an issue for you.

Tip 48 google. My business is now known as google business profile. Now you might hear people talk about, especially in old youtube videos and stuff about gmb's or google my business this is now had its name changed. It's called google business profile and it's for google business profiles offer businesses which google considers the kind of in-person type. So examples will be shops, pubs, restaurants, plumbers, electricians, all that kind of thing businesses that serve people in person a google business profile have. It helps you let google know where your business is located, what areas you service, and it helps you appear in know where your business is located, what areas you service, and it helps you appear in all sorts of places, like the local background Google search results. Tip 49, got a local business Register with Google business profile. It's free and it gets you shown in the local map results. I spoke about this in tip 48. If you have that type of business that serves people in person, then make sure you register for your google business profile. Get it all set up, because it'll just help you rank on those local queries.

Tip 50 always keep an eye on your competitor websites, especially when ranking updates occur, because you can get insights into what is and isn't working for them. Now I spend a lot of time watching competitor websites, especially when they have new features or change the design or content significantly. Seeing how changes they make correlate with changes in their rankings can give you some real clues into what is and what doesn't work in your niche. Keep an eye on what they're doing off page as well, such as any PR campaigns they're doing or link building they're doing. You can use them. Essentially consider your competitors as a test bed. They're running tests that you can watch and see the outcomes of, and you can use that to. It can save you from doing things that might not work well, but if you see things that are working well for them, then it's stuff that you can replicate or, even better, look to improve on. So always keep knowing your competitors, because there's lots of valuable information in there.

Tip 51 want to quickly and easily speed up your website. Use a content delivery network like cloud flare or amazon cloud front. Now a content delivery network, also shortened to a cdn, is a system that caches copies of your websites at edge locations around the world. This means that your site visitors get content served to them from the nearest edge to their physical location, meaning that your site loads faster for them. Now an edge is just a fancy word of saying a server. So basically, these networks position servers all around the world and they keep copies of pages and images and other files on your website on those servers so that when people request pages then they get served from there rather than coming all the way back to your origin server. So it actually really speeds up how your website works. And this ties in well with tip number one in this series, which is to make your website as fast as possible. So I'd strongly recommend those. Cloudflare is the most popular one, but Amazon Cloudfront I can also recommend because that's one that we use and it works really well if you're using Amazon for the rest of your hosting.

Tip 52. Want to learn more about SEO and meet others in the industry. I highly recommend attending SEO conferences like Brighton SEO and other SEO meetups, and I've made many friends and great contacts from going to conferences and meetups over the years, and it's especially important for me because I live in a really rural location. So the network I've built up from these events. It's great for sharing hints and tips with and getting advice when things aren't going to plan, and I've still got friends that I met years and years and years ago from these kind of meetups. Now, some of them are very formal, like big conferences, like bright seo, um, but others can just be like informal meetups in pubs, um. Go to places, search online, see if you can find one near you. They're, they're really worth going to, totally recommend them. And it doesn't matter what level of seo are. You'll find all levels at these places and it's particularly great, especially if you're you're new to seo, because you'll meet people who you can learn from, who are that little bit further on from you, and you'll you'll make you'll make great contacts through this tip.

Tip 53. Got a specific SEO question? Find me on Twitter, at Channel 5, and just ask. I'm always happy to help. If you've got a specific question and you can't find an answer to in these tips or in any of our podcasts, don't be afraid to get in touch. I don't bite. So yeah, my Twitter handle is Channel 5. It's a very long story as to why it's Channel 5, but that's been a name I've used online for many, many years, um. So yeah, so it's at channel five. Get hold of me, ask me any questions or email me. You can email me at podcast, at sco. Is not that hard, um dot com actually. No, that's not the right one, it's podcast. At keywords, people use dot com if you want to get in touch with me via email. So tip 54.

Got a manual penalty from Google. This means you've done something against their terms of service and have been manually penalised. It can be very difficult to get this penalty removed Now. It's difficult but not impossible. You can request that a manual penalty is removed by submitting a reconsideration request via the Google Search Console. You're more likely to be successful if you've made changes to your site so you're no longer in violation of Google's rules and you're also open and honest about what you've done and what you did wrong and also what you've done to sort out the problem when you make a request. I mean, if you follow Google's guidelines, you shouldn't be in a situation of getting a manual penalty. But if you think you've got a manual penalty, you can't be in a situation of getting a manual penalty. But if you think you've got a manual penalty, you can check it in Google Search Console. That'll tell you whether you've got a manual penalty or not. Also, if you've registered your site in Google Search Console, you should automatically be notified by email if you do get a manual penalty, but I hope for 99% of people hopefully it's something that'll never happen to you.

Tip 55, linking to a third-party site where you gain commercially, like your affiliate linking to a merchant always nofollow these links. So if you've got a commercial relationship of any kind with a third-party site, then Google considers these to be paid links. It's fine to have these kind of links as long as you mark them as nofollowed or sponsored. Google will then not count them as a ranking signal and neither you or the link site will risk any penalty. Google understand that people have to monetize their websites to cover their costs, to make them worthwhile doing. It's not against Google's guidelines to monetize your sites, but what is against their guidelines is for people to be paid for links, and that's whether you get paid in cash to ready for the link or whether there's a commercial relationship, like an affiliate relationship, where you get payment for anyone who signs up. So Google then wants to know that these links have been placed for commercial reasons so it can ignore them. So use the nofollow or the sponsored attribute on those links and you'll be fine.

Tip 56. Want to find out how many sites are linking to your site or any site. Use the Ahrefs backlink checker to find out. It's good practice to keep an eye on who is linking to your website. It helps to see what kind of content is attracting backlinks to your site and what types of pages and content are attracting links. You can look for patterns in the types of sites that are linking to you. So if you discover lots of property sites linking to you, for example it then this could give you good ideas for the type of sites to outreach to if you're trying to get um links by outreaching. So that's just the ahrefs free backlink checker, just google ahrefs free backlink checker and you'll find the link there and they'll give you the top thousand links and tell you what the DR of the site and all those kind of metrics. It's really useful for looking to backlink and is absolutely free.

Tip Google doesn't use meta keywords, so don't waste your time on them. Simple as that. Be very wary for anybody who tells you any difference saying that you should be filling up the meta keywords tag on your web pages. It's just. I don't think it's ever been used by google and it's just. It's just a complete waste of time. So you know, just don't bother. Don't bother with it. It's just the only way it's useful is to look out for people who tell you that you should do it, to know that you shouldn't really listen to anything else that they're telling you. Tip 58 google will sometimes use your meta description in the search results.

Sometimes it will construct its own description. Now, this can vary depending on the search query a user makes. Now it's annoying if you've created what you think are great descriptions, but there's not much you can do about it. Google claims they do it to make better descriptions for the user based on the search query, but it's still worth putting in your own description for how you want to describe your page. You just might find that sometimes Google will, depending on the intent of the search query that the user's given, might rewrite that description, but there's nothing to change. But if you do see it, why is Google not using my description? It's because Google thinks they know better.

Tip 59. I highly recommend you use a sitemapxml file to help Google find all your content, especially for larger sites. Now, sitemapxml is a special type of page for your site and it should contain the URL of every page on your site that you'd like Google to index. You should link to your sitemapxml from your robotstxt file and you can also upload it to Google Search Console. And that's my preferred method if I'm launching a new site to actually upload a sitemapxml from your robotstxt file. And you can also upload it to google search console, and that's my preferred method if I'm launching a new site, to actually upload a sitemapxml through google search console to specifically say to google these are all the pages I want you to index. You can create these by hand or you know there's plenty of tools that'll create sitemapxml for you. Just do a google how to create a sitemapxml. You'll just do a Google how to create a sitemapxml. You'll find loads of tutorials on how to do it, but it's really, really useful.

Tip 60, make sure your site is responsive so it renders well on devices of all different sizes. Now, this is so that your site will work well on small screens like mobile phones and tablets, as well as on desktop screens. Google will render your site on different screen sizes to test how it performs before deciding how to index and rank it. But by default now, google will always look at the mobile version first. They know that most people now access the internet on their phones, so that's why they use mobile first indexing. They will also look for it on desktops. That's why sometimes you might get different results in the search for desktop searches. But they'll also go mobile first. And obviously it's especially be careful about this because you're generally going to be creating these sites on computer, desktop computer or a laptop with a bigger screen. For most of the people who are actually sort of consuming your website will be doing it from mobile. So always make sure it looks good on mobile and all other sizes in between when you're creating your site. So tip 61.

404 pages that's the page not found pages that your web server should return. The page doesn't exist. They should return a 404 header code. If they return a 200 header code, this is known as a soft 404 and it's not advisable to do this. Now, this is because if a web server returns a 200 header code, then you're telling the search engine that this page is okay and it exists. It then risks Google looking at the page and deciding that you've got thin or non-valuable content on this page, and if this happens a lot, then it could cause Google to decide that your site is full of thin content and it can have a detrimental. Now, if you don't know what website header codes are and web server header codes are, this may sound like a whole load of gobbledygook. The way to find out if you've actually got this happening on your site is to go to Google Search Console and if Google has found soft 404s, it will report those in the errors. So look out for those and then if you Google around on how to fix this, you'll get a lot more information. So I know that it probably sounded nonsensical to many people, but it is something you can easily find by just going to google search console and then have a look around about how to get that fixed.

Okay, tip 62 prioritize quality over quantity for backlinks. Now, not all backlinks are created equal, so a backlink from an established site that itself has a lot more backlinks will be worth a lot more than a link from a brand new website that has few or none of its own backlinks. And, additionally, a link from a page or site that is topically relevant to your website has additional value, and this is because Google it doesn't count all links as equal from other sites to yours. Partly it will be to do with the authority of the page, the amount of page rank the page is linking to you has got will provide. The more page rank it has, the more page rank you will receive. But also Google also looks at where on the page links are placed. So some links can be more valuable just by the placement on the page so within the context and the content of an article is better than, say, a footer link. And also it looks at the words around links to decide the relevance. So if a page is talking about the same topic as your web page, that's being linked to, it can be more powerful than one that is on a completely different topic, where it looks just like the link has been inserted for no particular reason. Tip 63, more on links.

Be very careful if you decide to try buying backlinks, because it's against Google's terms of service. Not that it can't work. Just ask anyone who remembers the Google Penguin update how bad the consequences can be. You'll find a lot of SEO influencers out there who are just telling you that buying backlinks works, and often they'll also try to sell you backlinks as well. So there's a conflict of interest there maybe, but they won't often tell you of the risks of doing this. Now, buying backlinks can work and for the short term it you know it quite can often work. But in the long term, if you're lucky, then google will just discount these links and you'll have only wasted some money. But in the worst case google will penalize or even de-index your site. Then you'll have wasted money and hurt your website and just set yourself back to square one.

And I speak here from bitter experience, having been badly hit by the google penguin update many years ago. Um, we used to buy backlinks prior to penguin, um. Since then, that was when I had my epiphany and it was a case of I'm not ever going to buy a single balance again because you know, I just saw the value destroyed and all the work and money I'd put into getting those buying those backlinks just wiped out my site, um, and set set us back to, you know, to to position zero again and we had to start again with a whole new strategy. And it would have been better if we'd never done it in the first place. Now I'm not moralizing. Some people moralize on backlinks. I never moralize on whether people buy backlinks or not. It's purely your choice, just know the risks. Will buy backlinks or not. It's purely it's your choice, just know the risks. And also I would say to this be careful on of conflating paying a link builder who uses white hat techniques to boost links for you with going to a service that just sells links and would pay people for the links. There's a big difference there. People who build links for you using things like digital PR, that's fine, that's all within the guidelines. You've just got to avoid people who are just going out and basically bribing people to give you a link with no editorial control.

Okay, tip 64 buying an expired domain that has existing backlinks can give you an easy ranking boost to start a new site with, but just beware that the site wasn't previously penalized for something. Now, this tip is one that I've considered taking out of my tips because in march 2024, google announced that they now consider using expired domains as manipulating search results, as expired domain abuse, and so google are trying to crack down on this one. Now, that's not to say that there isn't some grey areas here. I think if you are buying a domain that's in a very similar niche to what you are wanting to start a site on, then probably going to get away with it. I think if you're just buying expired domains and then 301, redirecting them into your existing other website or the domain, then that may cause you more problems. It's yet to be clear how much effort Google have put into penalizing this and detecting it. It's one of those things that should be quite easy to detect, but I'm going to say that this one now needs to be treated with caution and is probably less of a beginner tactic than it maybe used to be.

Okay, tip 65 some niches are seasonal, so traffic levels can vary a lot through the year. Have this in mind. If you see traffic dropping, it could just be seasonal. So, for example, if a website that targets gardening, then you're going to see natural dips in traffic as you head into autumn and winter. At broadbandcouk we found that December was always an awful month for traffic and sales, as no one wants to switch their broadband in and run up to Christmas. But January would always be our best month, as people would ever spend it at Christmas, for looking for ways to save money on their bills by switching to a cheaper broadband supplier. So always look out for seasonality, especially if it's the first time you've launched a site or you're new to you're new to a niche because you know you might think, oh my god, everything's terrible. My traffic's dropping when actually it's just normal for the time of year and you know you've got to work out those seasonal patterns.

Tip 66 the weather can affect your website traffic. A sudden heat wave can drop traffic in many niches quite significantly as everyone rushes to be outside. I've seen this in e-commerce. Traffic sales drop dramatically for short periods when we have heat waves in the UK as people decide they'd rather be outside enjoying the sun rather than spending time online. But on the opposite side, if we get significant snowfall, then it can boost sales and traffic as people stay indoors. We've had this just at the time of recording. We've just had a really nice weekend in the uk and you know, saw traffic drop 10 to 20 on sites that target in the uk because people were just like hey, the sun's come out for the first time in ages, let's get outside. And you see sales drop. So just be aware. You know, if ever you see a sudden drop one day, just look out the window, look at the weather forecast. If it's a glorious weather, then you can probably say, actually let's not worry about today, we'll come back and check in a while these things if we have prolonged heat waves. I find that it normally takes three or four days and people start to resume their old habits and then you'll see the traffic come back up.

Tip 67 downtime can kill your rankings. Use a service like uptime robot to monitor your site and alert you to problems. Google doesn't want to recommend a site that's often not available I mean occasionally. You can get away with it, you know, because google appreciate that things happen. Tonight, even big, massive sites occasionally have outages, but if it becomes frequent then it will hurt your rankings. So be proactive. Set up monitoring so they get alerted as soon as your site develops any issues so you can fix it asap. And with uptime robot, they have free plans where it can check your website exists every five minutes. If it sees a problem, it will send you an email and then you can actually sort it out. It's free to set up and it means you don't have to be constantly checking the site yourself and can minimize downtime.

Tip 68 Looking to find websites that might link to you. Then look at your competitors' backlink profiles to find sites that link to sites like yours. This will show you sites that are already willing to link to sites like yours and they're perfect candidates for you to reach out to them and see if they will also link to you. If you want to see what kind of sites are linking to your competitors, then you can use Ahrerefs free backlink checker if you don't want to pay for a full hrefs account, and that'll give plenty of ideas and plenty of people to go talk.

Tip 69 always use alt text with images. It's good for google and it's also good for people with visual impairments. I mean, this is just good practice, both for seo and for accessibility. For google, it's another chance to reinforce what content is about, and for the impaired, it could be the difference between your site working or not working for them. So always, always use alt text with your images.

Tip 7, don't neglect internal links. They help Google navigate and understand your site, and real people use them as well. You should consider the internal links on your website, between pages, just like backlinks from external sites, but they're ones that you control. You can use the anchor text to send a signal to Google what the web page you're linking to is about, and they also help Google and your users find new and relevant content on your site. So, yeah, when it comes to anchor text, don't use click here.

Always use something that's descriptive of the page that you're linking to. Always try and make sure that pages are not too many clicks from your home page. Try and think of a logic, you know. Think of your website structure logically, but always, if you're writing any new article or any new piece of content, if there is a relevant term you can link to another page too, then do it. You know, look at, look at how Wikipedia links between pages. Wikipedia has a huge number of links on its page. Users don't mind it, google doesn't mind it. People could put more internal links, I think, than they do, and it's a really important tip.

So tip 71, use breadcrumbs on your site to help people and Google navigate and understand hierarchically related pages. So breadcrumbs work as a great way to enforce great internal linking on your site and to indicate the hierarchy and relationship between your pages, and they also help users see quickly where on a site they are and to move around within the site. Breadcrumbs you'll be familiar with, you'll have seen them on other sites. They're normally just under the navigation, normally top left hand side of the page, and it'll just normally start with home and then a little arrow or a pipe sign and then all the different pages where you are on that page so you can quickly go backwards between two category pages. If you're in a sub page of a category, so they're really, really good and you can use schema markup with them to help describe to google that it's a breadcrumb and how will your breadcrumbs fit together. So, yeah, top tip use breadcrumbs.

Tip 72 use schema markup on your site wherever you can. It helps google understand the information on your page. Now, schema markup is structured data in a specific format that's machine readable, so that google can read and understand specific content in your web pages. So there's schema for all sorts of entities. Like I just mentioned, there's schema markup for breadcrumbs. There's schema markup for people, organization, products and much more. You can learn more about what schema markups are available by going to schemaorg or just Googling schema. And, yeah, really strongly recommend that you implement any kind of schema you can.

Tip 73 want to see how topics trend and trend over time and what's trending now? Try google trends. Now, what people search for changes over time, so some topics wax and wane, others are very seasonal, some are one-hit wonders. Google trends allows you to see how popular different keyword searches have been over time and to compare them to other keywords popularity over the same time period. So if you just go to google google trends, it'll come up and you can. It's very simple to use a guy on twitter called um dan he. Um, he uses google trends quite a lot and he will post images from Google Trends that show the graph. And he also uses Haribo as a term to compare against, because the searches for the term Haribo stay very consistent over time. So if you use Haribo as a baseline, it sounds really good for comparing lots of different keywords against each other and the trends. So yeah, but if you want to see how things are trending over time google trends, tip 74, I want to show keywords people use account with others then you know that is completely possible.

Most of our accounts allow you to share access with multiple users, so it's great for brands and agencies. I've many people involved in developing the strategy and content for websites. So say, if you um, I think from light upwards, you can share your credits from your account with as many people as you want. There's unlimited users on the account, so you can just go to um if you click the um, your initial for the your user menu at the top um right of the screen. Um, you can. There's a link there to my team and in there you can share access to other people. Just pop in their email address and if they already have a QHPP account, it will share your account with theirs. Put them in your team and if they're not already a QHPP account holder, it'll send them an email invite them to sign up for a free account, that they can then access your account and your credits.

Tip 75, our graphical results are great, but make sure to click the other tabs for more data and related information. Now this is another keywords people use. Tip. We know from customer feedback how people love our graphical representations of keyword relationships and keyword clusters. However, to get the full picture, don't forget to explore the other tabs where even more data and insight is available. So, yeah, and in those places you can also, as well as download the images, you can also download download data in csv format so you can take it and put it elsewhere. So always make sure you see all the information rather than just looking at the images.

Tip 76 despite what some people say, it's possible for a site with really good content to naturally gain links without any outreach or buying. I've done it many times. It's not always fast, but it is safe. Now this is known as organic link building and this is where you just let the quality and usefulness of your content be the thing that attracts other people to link to you. It's not always as quick if you try to take shortcuts like link buying, but it is the safest method of link building and over time it becomes the one which is hardest to beat, because this is where you will get. You will get the links, um, from the kind of places that will never listen to outreach, will never sell a link, but will only link editorially, um. And yeah, it isn't the fastest always. It can be fast sometimes with keywords people use. If you want to look at the backlink profile of keywords people use, that is a classic, totally organic um backlink profile.

We've never done any outreach. We never did any digital pl. We haven't done anything other than just created a great tool, great site, and we just tweeted about it a little bit just to say, hey, look what we've built, um. But every single link that has come to that has come naturally, and it did. That did actually come quite quickly. But I've got other sites where it's taken a little bit longer. But as long as you make something good and in time, it will get links and they are safe a it costs you nothing and b you're safe from being penalized because there is nothing dodgy in your backlink profile. Lots of people say it's not possible to do, but I completely refute that because I've done it so many times since we got penalized by Penguin on Broadbentcouk and had to go for a completely natural backlink profile and we never that was. All we've ever done is organic, natural. We've never done any outreach and I think it's worked for the effect.

Tip 77, don't be afraid to link to other websites when it's relevant and makes sense for your audience. I think many websites should be linking out to others more than they do, and you'll see in these tips if you look at the web version of these tips. I've actually linked to many of the websites where it made sense to. This is, if nothing else, it's good and helpful for your site visitors because you're going to show them related content that you approve of editorially, and Google wants websites to be helpful. So if you're helpful by linking to good resources, it can be good for you. Um, and often you know, sometimes if you link somewhere else, if they spot it, they might actually they might actually link back to you in some cases. You can't guarantee it, but it does sometimes happen. But if it's good for your users, then do it.

Tip 78 does running ads on google help your search rankings? The answer is no. Yeah, there's an idea that I heard it less recently, but for a long time people thought that running google ads would somehow help your organic rankings. It was quite a persistent essay myth for a while, but it's absolute nonsense. Um, but thankfully we don't hear it repeated much nowadays. But I just wanted to put in here to make sure that if you ever did hear anyone suggest that, just discount that advice. Tip 79.

You need to run a large number of queries for any of the keyword people you search and try our bulk search. Now, a very useful feature on keywords that people use is the ability to do a bulk search. This is if you need to generate a huge number of questions really quickly. A good way. Where I often do this is I'll often run a Google autocomplete search on people who's first to generate one or two hundred related keywords for a topic and then I'll use these keywords in a CSV file to do a bulk search on. People also asked to generate many thousands of people also asked questions. That really covers the topic in depth. So if you want to get a huge, big overview of a topic and all the questions people are asking very, very quickly, that's a great tip. You will need a paid account to do that, though unfortunately it's not made on the free account just because of the the amount of querying it does for you because, like, for example, you can you can run several thousand queries instantly, pretty much on that one. So, um, but it is a very good tip.

If you need to get a complete overview, you know within a few minutes of a complete topic area to bait to you short descriptive urls. Keywords and your urls help indicate to google what page is about and what the structure of a site is. Don't stuff keywords, don't make it too long. You want to make it descriptive, but not over long, you know. Just look at any of my sites. Look at bookmarkcouk, look at keywords people use, look at how we use urls there and the hierarchy of them and also how much on each url you want it to be, just so that by reading url, a reader could get a good idea of what a page content was going to be about, without being so overly descriptive that it just goes on and on and on.

So, tip 81, use rel="chronicle to tell Google which version of any page that can be found via multiple URLs is the one that they should consider the authoritative version. In some cases, you may find that a page can be found on your website on more than one unique URL. Now this is common on sites that use CMSs like WordPress that allow you to have pages in multiple categories, but this could lead to Google deciding it was duplicate content, and we'd rather avoid that. So if we set one version to be the canonical version, this allows you to tell Google which to use as the one to index and treat as the authoritative version. It's just a tag that you set in the HTML of your code. Most CMSs will allow you to set what the canonical version of a page is if you go into the page settings and things like that. So just Google whatever CMS you're using and how to set the canonical tag the rel="canonical tag", and go from there.

Tip 82, always nofollow links that are within user-generated content. So if you allow users to post their own content on your site say, if you had a forum on your site or you're allowing people to post comments on your blog and these can include links then you need to tag these links as either nofollow or ugc. This is because you want Google to know that you don't endorse these links as a site and it protects you should a user decide to link to a site that may harm your site. It's just a safety method in there so you can clearly say to google this content and these links are user generated and not to be considered the editorial views of this website. Tip 83 if you allow any kind of user generated content, then I strongly suggest you moderate it before allowing it to be posted. This follows on from the previous tip.

The very safest way to deal with any user generated content is to proactively moderate it before you allow it to be posted. This works well for sites that allow reviews. Not so well if you've got a forum, because adding delays in forums for moderation can have a detrimental experience for your site users. But forums a good forum will tend to self-police itself and you can do of do post moderation. That's where you go in and if someone has broken rules and it's other users have reported, then you can maybe go and remove and edit things after they've been posted. But if you're doing review sites especially where these are sites where users aren't going to be, they're not really conversing with each other, they're not building a reputation for themselves it's very sensible to moderate those before you post them. Same with if you allow blog comments or post comments on anything you've got. With broadbandcouk, we allowed people to review their broadband supplier and we got some horrendously rude and possibly libelous reviews that people tried to put on there. So we always moderated every single one of those reviews that we received before we decided to post it, sometimes just to remove profanity and sometimes just because they were gibberish and spam, or sometimes just because we felt that it was a potentially libelous review.

Tip 84, concentrate on topics, not individual keywords. Write about a topic and the keywords get included. Naturally, too many people obsess over individual keywords and trying to rank for them and this can lead you to focus too narrowly when producing contrament, to the detriment of your site. By focusing on writing naturally on a topic and the subtopics within, you'll naturally cover many more keywords and in a way that flows for your readers and over time, this is the kind of content that will build your site into a topical authority. You know this is this is a frustration I've always had is the way that people will sort of frustrate themselves by concentrating too much on keyword volume as a metric and chasing volume, rather than trying to kind of holistically cover and semantically cover a topic in the in the round and just by right, just right. Naturally, you know, google is now so much better than it was many years ago at understanding semantic, semantically related words, terms, phrases and concepts, so you don't have to blindly hit keywords. It's it's much more sophisticated in the way that it understands content nowadays compared to, you know, pre-hummingbird. So, yeah, don't focus too much on keywords, focus on broad topic areas and you'll you'll write much better content.

Tip 85 there's nothing wrong with old, evergreen content, but every so often give it a reread and update anything that's now out of date. Many people in the seo world obsess a little too much about fresh and new content and they're convinced that you have to keep churning out new content all the time to stay relevant and keep ranking. But that's really not my experience at all. I mean, I've got sites. I haven't added any pages to for years but they still rank well. Do make sure that pages keep up to date as things change, like on broadbandcouk, we had to keep up on top of the latest broadband tech. But don't just churn out new content all the time for the sake of it. You know, look at some, especially if you're covering historical stuff. Lots of facts don't change. You don't have to be constantly refreshing stuff.

I think a lot of people get confused because there is a concept of called query deserves freshness in google where for specific topics and especially news topics, then yes, google will look for sites with new and fresh content, but that doesn't cover every single query and you know 90 plus 99, even probably the questions that people ask on google don't need to be from fresh content. They just need to be from good, authoritative content. To page six, create faq pages, frequently asked questions pages, and you can use obviously use keywords people use to find the questions that people are frequently asking. People search on google to get answers to questions. It's just plain common sense to cover frequently asked questions on your site. Faqs work particularly well on product pages and review pages, but pretty much any page can benefit from an faq section and so, yeah, always make sure to include faqs and, you know, always go to a good source such as QA3 for use for finding what people are actually asking.

Tip 87 your site should have these basic pages about privacy policy terms and conditions and contact. The Google quality rate guideline specifically recommends that raters look for these types of pages when trying to evaluate eeat. You know experience, expertise, authority to miss and trust the signals for a website that google wants those sites which have those eeat signals. They also add trust signals for your audience because they show who you are, how you look after their personal data and how they can get in touch with you. Personally, I don't like if I look at a site and it doesn't show me. At least just have somewhere where I can just find some basic information about how to contact a site, what the terms and conditions are, who owns the site. If those things are missing, then a whole lot of trust is missing and Google is going to pick up on those things. So just put those basic pages on that don't take a long time to produce For all the privacy policy terms, conditions or those legalese. There's lots of free templates out there that you can use and to put a contact form on. It's dead simple, so do put those on all your sites.

Tip 88. Use a content calendar to plan what content to produce and when to publish it, especially if you're working with a seasonal topic. Yeah, this is especially important if there's any kind of seasonality or time sensitivity to your site's themes. E-commerce sites tend to have busy seasons, depending on what they're selling and you want. You want your content lined up and ready before you peak. There's no point writing a guide to you know summer and gardening trends in the summer, because by the time you've written it, the time you've got it on your website, the time it's got indexed, the time it's started ranking, by the time all that is done, the season is over. You've got to line things up early and ready for these things and if you cover sports or any kind of upcoming events that happen in the topic you're covering, you need to be ready for them. You know, I think, big sporting events here, you know. You know when the fa cup finals coming. You know when the superbowl's coming. If you want to time any content with with these things, you've got to have a plan up front of when you're going to do it. Get it lined up, get the resources in and make sure the content's produced well in time.

Tip 89 build on existing pages. Add new content to existing pages that rank well to make them rank for even more related terms. Always keep an eye on your existing pages that are doing well. Can you improve or add to them to increase its reach even more? I mean it can often be easier and bring quicker results to build on existing content rather than starting from scratch. So, yes, always evaluate where you can improve on the pages you've got, because it's just a great, perfect starting point.

And tip 90, try and build a brand over time so you become the authority for a topic area. I mean, google loves brands, people love brands. By building a brand, you're sending positive signals to your customers and to Google when you end game and I know it's not easy, but the end game is to try and get people to think of your site when they think of a topic. And you don't have to have it so that the entire world thinks of your site and think of a topic. But if you are serving your audience well and you become a leader in your in your topical area, then people who are interested in that area and that topic will start to get to know you and they will start to come to you and they will start to link to you. So that's why it's worth trying to build a brand and just thinking about whether your content's good enough to bring people back repeatedly, whether you're covering it enough so that if someone who is trying to research, learn about or it's just a real enthusiast for a topic area, will start to think of your site. And that's how you start to build a brand.

Tip 91. So, are you a business with physical locations? Then add your locations to your website. You need to make it easy for people to find out where your locations are and how to get to you. If you've got multiple locations, have a page for each location, include maps, telephone numbers, opening times and what services and products are available at each location. It's all too often you see web pages of companies which don't give clear instructions on how to get to them. If you are a business that serves people from a physical location, you've got to make it really clear where that location is, what services you offer, how to get there, how to contact opening times, all those kind of things. Tip 92, have clear calls to actions, also known as CTAs, in your page so your audience knows what you want them to do. Next, every website has an end goal or goals that it wants its visitors to complete Buy a product, download an e-book, sign up for an email list, visit a location.

Even if you're just a display site, you want people to view more pages, so make sure on every page you've got a clear call to action, or even multiple calls to action, so every site business knows what you want to do. Next, it's just all too often you see pages on websites where it's not clear what you want people to do. And, as I say that, even if you're just trying to use display advertising, where you just want people to read a page so you get paid for those other impressions, point them to related pages they can visit within the document and at the end of the page that you're that you've got them on so that you get another impression. It's just a simple thing to do. If you just get even just 10 of those people click to view another page, you've increased your revenue by 10. If you're an affiliate, make sure you've got clear call sections for people to go and visit the merchant site that you want to potentially purchase from. If you're an e-commerce site, make sure you've got a clear add to car, add to basket, buy this product. Whatever it is that you want people to do, just make sure that you clearly ask them and you will see a massive uplift in your conversion rate if you just add those kind of things in Tip 93,.

Keep track of major Google updates at Google Search Central. If you just go to Google Search Central, which is the blog and the site where the search liaison team put all their information, then you'll find there's a page on there which has got a history of all the major google updates going back to 2020, and they also remember they do do minor updates more frequently. These won't be announced, but the big ones will be announced on google search central. So just keep an eye on there and if you ever think you've got an issue with rankings, go and just see if anything has been launched. Tip 94.

Google doesn't just index web pages. It also ranks other document types like PDFs, word docs, text files and much more. So this is why it's worth adding links to any non-web page documents. That will be valuable for people to find and you're happy to make them. So pdfs obviously the simplest and easiest to add and share if you have them. So say you're a restaurant or you've got a client who is a restaurant or a takeaway, you know if they've got pdf versions of their menus, things like that, load them on the website and link to them, because google will index them and will send traffic to tip 95.

Avoid black cat se SEO techniques that try to get around Google's terms of service. They sometimes might work in the short run but tend not to be sustainable over time. So sure, black hat techniques can and do work, but they're loopholes and Google is constantly looking to close these loopholes. The additional downside is that once a site is discovered using black hat techniques, it will be quickly penalized by Google. So if churn and burn is your thing, then fine, you know. If you're going into it with your eyes wide open, know what you're doing and you're accepting the risks and you're going to hammer it hard until you get hit, but you're happy and accepting when it gets hit, then fine. Uh, you know, don't moralize over black cat techniques, but personally I like to build for the long term and black cat sites don't tend to last for the long term. So, yeah, just be careful about what you choose to do.

Tip 96 looking for content ideas. Look at what videos in your topic area are popular on YouTube. Youtube's an underrated, completely underrated, source of content ideas. Very few people think to look there and, as it gives published dates, a number of views of each video, you can actually see what video subjects drive the most interest over time. Um, so yeah, and that's unusual, because if you you go to any web, web page, website, you haven't got a clear indicator of how popular a piece of content is. Okay, sure, there are tools that have a guess at it, but but on YouTube you know exactly how many people have watched the video and in what time period since it launched. You can also see how popular the videos get, comments and things like that. So, yeah, it's just a great place to go and grab some ideas.

Tip 97, looking to monetize an informational website. Looking to display on networks like Google, adsense, medival En vine, raptive and zoic um, informational websites can be the hardest to monetize directly. Adding display adverts is as easy as you have to deal um with individual advertisers. It's really hassle free. But just one word of warning here don't ever do the amount of ads you show to the point that it becomes too intrusive for your site visitors. It'll annoy them and it could start to negatively affect your search rankings. I mean, google, in its um quality guidelines, does accept that adverts are a fact of life and that websites need to monetize they do talk about if it becomes too intrusive. Um, so yeah, just be careful. But let's say it's an easy way to monetize first, if you've got low traffic and you aren't in a position to negotiate any kind of affiliate agreements or produce your own products or anything like that, it can be a great first starting point for monetizing. But yeah, just be cautious about overdoing it.

Tip 98, offer your audience some valuable content like an e-book, a product sample or a trial in return for their email address so you can build a relationship with them. Building an email list of people interested in your site and topic can become a very valuable asset. Having an email list makes it easy to launch new pages and features. You can push news out to your audience and wait for people to return to you to discover new developments. It helps with building a brand. Don't just ask people to sign up for a newsletter, as people just won't. You've got to offer them something valuable in return for their email address. So, for example, on QsPeopleUse, you know we offer free accounts to people in return for their email address. You know you get more searches by giving this email address. We can then obviously talk to you. We can then push content to you rather than just wait for you to come back.

Tip 90, a-b testing to test different versions of a web page to see which performs better. You will never get a website design and page contents perfect the first time, and A-B testing is where you can create a new version of a page, the B version, and show this to a percentage of your visitors and see if it performs better than your original version, the A version. Doing this means you can see which performs best for you in terms of what you want people to do, such as seeing which version of a page a product page leads to more examples, for example. So when you have a winner, you now then make that the new default page. Then you think about how you're going to improve that one further and then run a new A-B test where your new A version is tested against a new B version, and this is a way of basically continuously improving how your website and your content performs just to scientifically performs, to get much more improved conversion rates and get your site performing much better for you.

Tip 100, want to see how real people use your site in real time for free? Then try Microsoft Clarity. So when you create a site for yourself, you obviously get to know inside out and how you expect people to interact with it. However, to know how people really interact with it, you need to watch them, see what happens. Clarity allows you to do this and actually watch people interacting with your site in real time and you can discover what does and doesn't work for people and, trust me, it's always a real eye-opener. And yet you can literally watch people moving the mouse around the screen, clicking, filling in forms, all those kind of things in real time and also recordings. It also helps you discover things like what it calls rage clicks. That's where people are clicking all around the screen trying to find something to click on. Or you can see where people are constantly clicking where they think is a link, and often it might not be. So, yeah, you can get all sorts of insights from this. It also gives you plenty of other analytics insights as well. So it's a great um. So if you just google for microsoft clarity, um, yeah, get it installed. All you've got to do to install it is put, um, a little bit of javascript in. Which is that easy to do? And, um, yeah, it's brilliant and highly recommend it.

Tip make it easier for people to sign up to your site by letting them use their google account to sign in. So if any part of your site requires people to create a user account, and I strongly recommend allowing them to use their Google account to do so, because it makes signing up so much simpler for the user and it'll increase the likelihood of people creating an account with you. If you can remove any kind of friction in the process of creating an account, then you're gonna improve your signup rate. And when we added in Google accounts as a signup option to keywords people use, our signup rate almost doubled overnight. It made that much difference and now you know the vast majority of people who create accounts of keywords people use are using their Google account to sign in. So, yeah, it's a real no-brainer, get that one installed and it's just a real good little conversion rate improvement hack.

Hi, this is Ed back at the end. Hopefully you enjoyed that compilation. If you do want to get all these tips in written format, there is a link in the show notes where you can go and just get a PDF of all the tips all in one place and then you've got them all for easy reference. So, yeah, do go and get those if you found this useful and yeah, see you next time. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywords. People use calm, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywords. People use calm to get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my hundred and one quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. You want to get in touch? Have any questions? I'd love to hear from you. I'm at Channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast. At keywords, people use dot com. Bye for now, and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.