Five SEO tips to improve and promote your website

Use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to monitor traffic

Like the dashboard on your car can tell you many things about vehicle performance and problems, Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools can give you the same insights into how your website is working. This free and very useful set of tools can show you how much traffic is reaching your website, where it is coming from and even how long visitors have been viewing your website. Monitoring your traffic regularly can help you to identify how your website is working and whether any improvements or adjustments need to be made.

Optimise each page on your website correctly

Search engine optimisation, or SEO as it is also commonly called, is the process of optimising your web pages so that they can be found easily by Google. You can do this in a variety of different ways, but there are certain rules you will need to follow. Google is updating its search algorithms all of the time and if you break their best practice rules for optimisation, you may find that your website is penalised.

Each page has a set of attributes that can be optimised. These attributes are mostly set within the HTML code of each page, but many platforms such as Joomla and Wordpress have optimisation tools you can use that don't require you to know HTML. Heading tags, links, image alt tags and descriptions are just some of the ways you can optimise your page using keywords and key phrases. You can also optimise the content on each page by using keywords. It all counts towards your Google ranking.

You can research your website keywords using Google's Adwords Keyword Tool.

Don't overuse keywords on your website

Keywords are a fantastic way to bring more traffic to your website, but they have to be used in the right way. Keyword density is the percentage of times that a particular keyword is used on your web page compared to the total amount of words on the page. When a user types a search into Google, they will often use a keyword, for example 'website design'. Google will then look for websites using matching keywords within their pages and bring those results back to the user.

Beware of using too many keywords. You could have your website or web pages penalised by Google as a result. Keyword stuffing is the practice of using too many of the same keywords on one page. We recommend that you use a keyword density of between 1 - 3% for optimum results.

How to get more backlinks

Backlinks are links on other websites that point to your website. The days of stuffing pages with backlinks are over. Google got wise to this practice quite a while ago. Instead, you will need to use some cunning, but very effective ways to get traffic back to your website. It's all about quality over quantity these days, and below you will find some good pointers on how to create good quality backlinks.

• Avoid companies saying they can get you 1000 quality backlinks in a week, or any other short timescale. Patience is required when building links and using those services are a sure way to get penalised by Google.
• Writing guest posts for other websites is a great way to get links back to your website. Choose high quality sites that are relevant to your products or services.
• Participate in forums by offering good advice to problems or questions. You can include your website URL within your reply or at the end. Again, try to choose websites that are relevant to your niche or industry.
  
• Use your social media pages to use links that direct traffic back to your website. This might be to an existing or new page or a blog post you have recently published.

Beware of spamming techniques

Let's face it, nobody likes spam. It dominates our inboxes, wastes our time and unless you have a good spam filter on your mailbox, it can be a pain to manage. With this in mind, you should always be careful of using spamming techniques on your website or any other digital marketing tool you use. Before writing a new landing page, web page, blog post, email or social media post, think about whether you would see it as spam or something your audience will find useful. If it's the former, it's probably best to discard it and try a different approach.