Quick SEO Tips #11 - #20

I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years . The SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years . Hello and welcome to the latest episode of SEO is not that hard . Today I'm going to cover tips number 11 to number 20 from my 101 quick SEO tips .

See the show notes , where you can download a PDF with all those tips in if you want to get a hard copy of them . But let's get on with tip number 11 . So , tip 11 make sure some content on your website is evergreen , content that doesn't go out of date quickly and can generate traffic for a long period of time .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 broadbandcoukuk , we had loads of evergreen content and 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 , the actual 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 and 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 sort of 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 . It 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 , um , you need a real , real authority site with lots of history to for google to reward you with those head turn .

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 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 to them . 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 than 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 is what 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 are successful are those that start a website , continue plodding on at it .

You know 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 their 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 from somebody , 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's 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's 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 penalised . 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 what they're suggesting for them to do . It's against Google's terms of service . So you need to have your eyes open . You need to know what's going on .

So just familiarise yourself with Google's spam policies just Google spam policies and you'll find them very clear , very easy to read . 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 . Even Twitter , bbc 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 that you're 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 a 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 and industry commentators . Herf helps stay in touch with agencies and views every week . Just Google SEO newsletters .

You'll find a lot of people doing them . Sign up for a few and just you know . 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 big fan of podcasts .

You know you're listening to my podcast now and they are 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 .

Find some that you enjoy listening to , and obviously , listen to this one , that's a great start , and , but there are others out there . I you know I don't say , just listen to me , listen to plenty of others too , um , and you know you've made a good , great start by listening to this one , though .

And tip 20 last one for the day think about how you monetize your site . Options include affiliate marketing , display advertising , digital products , e commerce and many more .

It pays to start thinking about how you'll 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 , and that's it . That's tips number 11 to number 20 . I hope you've enjoyed them . I hope you found them useful .

As I say in these show notes is a link to a PDF that you can download with all my 101 tips in and , you know , go and get them . But we'll be doing more tips in future episodes . 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 usecom , 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 usecom 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 .