After heavily investing in a website, your next move should be focused on optimising your website so that potential customers can easily find you on the web.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) uses various techniques to increase your website’s visibility on search engines, so that it appears near the top of the results when keywords related to the product or service you sell are entered into the search. Since 75% of users don’t go past the first page of Google search, optimising your website for search is absolutely crucial for its success.

With billions of websites online, chances are your website competes with many others so you need to prove to Google and other search engines that you are better than the rest. Since there are hundreds of factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking your site, applying an SEO technique is not an easy one, which mean many individuals often give up on it when they don’t see instant results.

If you are considering doing SEO yourself, or getting an agency to do it for you, then you need to ensure you both know what you are doing, as poor knowledge of the subject could mean your website is penalised (a.k.a ‘Google slapped’) or even banned by the search engine.

Here are 3 top tips from our Head of Online Marketing Daniel Cave, to tell you what you should avoid when it comes to SEO.

1.)    Don’t buy low quality links

Getting back links is important, but creating them in a way which potential customers might consider as ‘spammy’ will not only look bad for your company, but could result in you being penalised and could lead to your site being permanently removed from the search engine.

2.)    Don’t use low quality or duplicated content in your pages

Make sure you produce in-depth, original content for your website. Poor quality content is sure to send your user elsewhere, so make sure you write engaging content that will satisfy the needs of your customer.

3.)    NEVER EVER consider ‘cloaking’ or any other black hat SEO techniques

Cloaking is where your website has two versions of a page – a content-rich page vs. a page low in content. The search engine only reads the content-rich page and therefore boosts your website up the rankings, but the user sees a different version of the page – the page that is low in content.

This really is a big no-no when it comes to SEO so definitely avoid it (or any other black hat SEO techniques) as it almost guaranteed to get you banned from search engines.

GET FREE ADVICE: If you want to know more on the dos and don’ts of SEO then check out our FREE SEO workshop led by our Head of Online Marketing Dan Cave and Web consultant, Charlie Martin.

The workshop has proven extremely beneficial for those that have already attended, see what Nicola Ward, Kyoo Marketing Services had to say:

“For me the Optix Solutions SEO workshop was extremely valuable.  Dan and Charlie had taken on board our various requirements thoughtfully and weaved them effectively into the workshop.  I came out with a much better understanding of some of the ways we could really help drive appropriate and relevant traffic to our site, both on our own and also using specialists to support us. It was a relevant and enjoyable session which I really appreciated.”

The next workshop will be held on the 26^th September at 2.00 p.m. Please register below – (Hurry there are only 4 spaces for this event!)