I was snooping around the net at the weekend and wanted to find out the most popular websites. I had a vague idea of what they might be, but just wanted a current list. http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/most-popular-websites Take a look at the list! Now your website may not be on this list, you probably check it for its Google ranking and get piqued when it’s not at the top. But there is still a lack of understanding, maybe fear (?) about what SEO is and how to use it to help you rise up the Google rank. You will probably see lots of articles on the web and lots of companies offering to SEO your website. For a price £. Maybe a very large price £££. But if you have kids, they probably know how to do it because it’s actually pretty easy. And if a child can do it, why not you? We know it’s not easy to say what the Top 10 best SEO tips actually are, especially with all those ‘experts’ claiming to “know the SEO tricks” and “secrets Google doesn’t want you to know about!’ So we try to make it super easy for beginners at SEO and have 5 tips which can be applied for any organisation or industry. If you put any of our thoughts into action, please share your comments and any impact they make with us! 1. Start with local SEO It can be tempting to aim for the stars and set your goal on keywords like ‘Accountant’ or ‘Motor Insurance’. But before you go for these blockbuster keywords, it makes a lot more sense to target easier local SEP keywords like ‘Watford Accountant’ or ‘Glasgow Insurance’ depending on where your business is located. 2. Google SEO is a slow process This is one of the more simple SEO tips to understand, although one of the most frustrating. No matter how well you take heed of Google SEO tips and tricks, the process is going to be slow. No one is able to rank a site #1 overnight unless the keywords are completely useless. No one. And this makes sense for Google too, as it prevents the search engine results pages (SERPS) from fluctuating too much. You have to prove yourself for more than just a week for Google to reward you with a Top 10 ranking. And if we’re talking about the top keywords, it might very well take you or your SEO company an entire year. This goes for Google, Bing and Yahoo and for any content management system (CMS) – WordPress, Joomla or whatever. No one is exempt from this trust-building phase. 3. SEO BEFORE website design Web design is inherently very sexy. SEO, not so much! And although we’re the first to admit that web design is extremely important, it’s a good idea to take care of your SEO before you work on the web design or at least your web designer should have a professional SEO on their side to consult him. This simple SEO tip will save you from headaches down the line, as it’s an absolute pain to go back and have to change your core web design and make it more search engine friendly. Much better to fix this at the start. 4. BING SEO=Google SEO A common mistake SEO blogger make is they think they have to optimise their site for Google and Bing separately, somehow thinking these two search engines have drastically different ranking algorithms. The truth is, yes, their algorithms are different, but they use two separate strategies to rank your sites on both. What works for one, will probably work for the other, and most of their algorithm differences are things that you can’t control anyway (keywords and your domain name, for example). 5. Focus on link diversity Recently, search engine research confirmed what many top SEO’s already know: it’s not just how many links you receive, it’s from how many different websites. Google loves to see link diversity in your backlink profile, so give them what they want to see and try to score from as many different sites as possible. Link diversity makes up about 6.25% of the entire Google algorithm. This might not seem like much, but it’s actually pretty important. Google has stated that they look at more than 200 search engine ranking factor accounts for 0.5% of the entire algorithm. This makes link diversity 12.5x more important than your average ranking factor. Need more SEO tips and tricks? Visit the new Creativedge free mobile App for more Tips on SEO. https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/top-10-tips/id796349890?mt=8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.elixsoft.creativedge