Three Simple Steps to SEO Success

If you were to ask a dozen small business owners across the UK what makes the ideal approach to Search Engine Optimisation, chances are you’d be served up a minimum of 12 different explanations. Everyone has his and her own opinion of what you should be doing and what to avoid at all costs, while their success stories and lack thereof will also differ accordingly.   The thing is, anyone that says they’ve mastered SEO and know the whole process inside out is largely overstating their talents. Given the way SEO is constantly changing, it is impossible to have the art mastered for more than a few months – think of it like trying to score between constantly moving goalposts.That being said however, there are at least a few rudimentary tips and tricks that have come to light over the years as 100% rock-solid bases for any SEO campaign and should never be overlooked. And of course, much of the process is about laying the groundwork in the first place, so stick with the following three essentials and you’ll at least be heading in the right direction:

1. Keyword Selection

Like it or not, you’re going to have to be prepared to put the hours into keyword research and accept that most of the obvious ideas you already have in mind are about as wrong and useless as it gets. The reason being a rather simple one – choose the wrong keywords in the early days and it doesn’t matter in the slightest what kind of tricks you pull with the rest of your SEO campaign, it will come to nothing…or next to nothing, at best. Keywords represent the foundations and very first building blocks of an SEO campaign, meaning that weak foundations will never, ever be able to support a strong future. And worse still, once you’ve realised a while down the line that your keywords are garbage, there’s little scope for anything other than starting again from scratch…ouch!

2. Careful Use of Backlinks

Please note: careful does not mean outrageously abundant…it means exactly what it says. The thing with backlinks is that they are in one respect just as important and powerful in SEO as they ever were, but Google and its counterparts have been moving Heaven and Earth to make it more and more difficult to score points with conventional backlink building. Roughly summed up, quantity is largely out of the window and has been replaced with quality, meaning that in order for backlinks to carry any weight whatsoever they must be carefully thought out and targeted – not blasted all over the web randomly. In fact, get carried away with poor quality backlinks in large numbers and you can kiss goodbye to your chances.

3. Back to Basics

SEO is changing by the day and will continue to do so – something from which there is sadly no escape. However, this doesn’t mean that there’s any sense in looking at the core tips and tricks of years gone by as redundant, as some of the most effective strategies in SEO are as useful and indeed essential today as they were five years ago. It is simply a case of not getting blindsided by new developments and forgetting to go back to basics – meta tags, backlinks, blogs, article submissions and so on all being of crucial importance. The important part is knowing where the search engines are drawing the lines in terms of what’s acceptable practice and what isn’t.