5 On and Off-Site SEO Tips

There's no discipline quite like search engine optimisation. While traditional advertisers spent their early years studying detailed guides, researching from the masters, and bouncing from one class to another, the world's leading SEOs spent their time on a remarkably different set of exercises. With no formal 'rules' and little in the way of instruction, SEO is certainly an industry for the ambitious.

But that doesn't mean that ambition alone can drive you to the top of the SEO heap. While the fuel of a die-hard work ethic can help you complete a lot of tasks, doing so is useless without the right skill set. These five SEO tips can form the basis of your search knowledge. Before you build links without thought, make sure you're using these five search engine optimisation suggestions.

1. Building links? Use varied anchor texts.

If you're building links to a website manually, it's important to remember that anchor text variation can help your website rank. While a single keyword may be your target, it's incredibly rare to see a website with just one anchor text on all its inbound links.

Apply some variation in your anchor text selection and you'll see an instant boost in rankings, even if you own and operate a relatively new website. Whether you're link building to cement your place in Google or simply to give your website a timely bump, doing so with varied anchor text is always a wise idea.

2. Include target keywords in your on-site content.

This ultra-basic SEO tip seems to elude even the greatest minds in the industry, who pass it over without a single thought. No matter how good your on and off-site SEO are, they're useless when your website contains none of your target keywords.

Build internal pages on your website around a set of keywords, and ensure that they're linked to from your primary page. Doing so gives you a wide variety of content to have indexed in Google, improving your rankings and boosting your website's authority value.

3. Limit outbound links to bad 'neighbourhoods.'

Is your website performing poorly in the search engines, despite having superior on and off-site SEO to that of your competitors? It may be worth checking your website for unethical outbound links, particularly those that point users towards bizarre, unknown, or potentially spammy pages.

While outbound links rarely affect long-term rankings, a sudden increase in links to unethical or otherwise poor pages can result in a temporary rankings drop. Check to make sure that your links are all pointing towards active, ethical domains, and ensure that you never link to spam websites.

4. Don't worry too much about keyword density.

If there's one way to ruin a wonderful blog post, it's to stuff it with irrelevant keywords. While SEO is very much a numbers game, the amount of times your keyword is repeated in a post has little to do with your placement in search. By all means add keywords, but be sure to maintain readability.

Here's a good way to judge keyword inclusion: Does your article benefit from the keyword being included? If it doesn't, axe the search-friendly keyword and use a different phrase in its place.

5. Think natural. What would Google do?

The websites that perform best in search aren't always those that use flashy inbound links, stuff keywords into their content, or trick Googlebot with a unique referrer script. They're often small websites, particularly those that offer interesting content on a unique subject.

Be natural. Search can be manipulated, but doing so rarely produced long-term results. While the temptation to crank your off-site SEO efforts to eleven may be enormous and difficult to ignore, it can often be more profitable in the long term to focus on natural search engine optimisation.