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 .

Welcome to the latest episode of SEO is not that hard . In this episode I'm going to cover my quick SEO tips , number 41 to number 50 . So , without further ado , let's start with tip 40 . Have your site use either wwwdomaincom or just domaincom and 301 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 in 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 throw one 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 and you know , sometimes it's things that I disagree with 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 are 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 , um , for those keywords that we were targeting with those H1s . So that's just me getting people saying H1s don't count anymore . I don't know what they're talking about . So that's why 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 , measure the results of 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 changes on keywords people use , 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've got to experiment , otherwise you won't learn .

Tip 44 . There's no ideal keyword ratio for content . This is sometimes also referred to as keyword density . If you come across someone talking about keyword density or ratios 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 they were very basic things that the more 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 at the foot of the page over and over and over again to force your way to the top . But again you could be easily beaten by just someone doing adding 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 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 slight migration .

Most important thing you can do , if possible , is to keep page urls the same . If not , then make sure all this , 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 . 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 , um back , um , in the late 2000s . We'd , you know , the original site was set up in um , uh java , uh java 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 , you know , we need to make all our pages no longer be have the you know the file name on the end for whatever programming language it's in . That was you know 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 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 deal 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 . 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 all sorts of places like the local back on 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 . You know , 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 last one of the day 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 what they're doing off page as well , such as any pr campaigns are 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 an eye on your competitors , because there's lots of valuable information in there .

That's it for today . As I say , if you want all 101 quick seo tips , there's a link in the show notes to download a pdf with them all in , and I hope you find them useful . 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 keywordspeopleusecom , 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 keywordspeopleusecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips . Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode . If 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 keywordspeopleusecom . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard .