Written by search engine optimization consultant Blake J. Discher.
1. Keep Your Content Fresh
The search engines love, love, love fresh content. Change your site’s content as frequently as possible. This doesn’t mean have a blog as your home page. Doing so will bounce you up and down in the rankings since your copy is constantly changing as your new posts bump off the older ones and the amount of keywords changes with each post. One photographer I know puts up a “picture of the day” each morning. That’s a great way of changing up the page’s content without altering your body copy.
2. Create a Search-Engine-Friendly Responsive Website
It’s a fact, more than 60-percent of all searches are done on mobile devices. This means that your site must be responsive, meaning that it reformats itself for various browsers: desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets.
3. Avoid Over Optimizing Your Website
“Some SEO is good, so more SEO must be better.” False! File this one under, “Ask me how I know?” More important now than ever, over-optimization can hurt a sites rank. Keyword stuffing (an excessive number of uses of your keyword phrases) and excessive hyper-text links with anchor text consisting of your keyword phrases can also hurt your rank. Don’t go crazy and as you’re changing your site, tweak it in small steps, and then wait for the engines to re-crawl your site. You want to be able to know exactly what change to undo if your site’s position falls.
4. Create Good TITLE Tags
Simply put, this should contain the phrase for which you think most search users will enter when searching for someone who provides your services. The TITLE should generally be about eight words in length and not repeat words. Unless you think potential clients will search for you using your name, leave it out of the TITLE tag. Read my detailed post about this here.
5. Write a Good Meta DESCRIPTION Tag
Generally, this will be about 160 characters in length and should include your keyword phrase(s) near the beginning of the text. Keep it straightforward, this is what is displayed as a description of your page in the search result pages.
