The Unsolicited #SEO tips series started on LinkedIn but unfortunately got too big for the LinkedIn article system, which is why we’re now here!
If you haven’t seen the unsolicited #SEO tips series before, I basically post a single SEO tip every day on my LinkedIn and then curate them into these posts for every new 100 tips!
If you haven’t met me before, then “hi!”. My name’s Mark Williams-Cook and I’m a director here at Candour, I run the free SearchNorwich meetup and the Search with Candour podcast.
I’m really proud to say, we’re up to 400 tips now: That’s more advice than you would normally find in a whole book about SEO, right here, for free!
New: bonus videos: I have put some preview clips of videos from our Udemy SEO course, which is under construction. At the time of writing we have about 6 hours of video content on there, it’s about 33% done and I am adding at least one new video a week. We gave access to the course for free to those made redundant by Coronavirus and I we have let a few ‘beta’ testers on the course, with the knowledge that it is still under construction! If you’d like to hear more about that when we are ready to release it or want to request early access, send me a message on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Enjoy!
2019 Unsolicited #SEO tips:
Tip #1:
“We’ll produce 2 blog posts a week of 500 words”. If your SEO strategy sounds similar to that, I can pretty much guarantee you are wasting your money.
Tip #2:
If someone tells you that Googlebot can process Javascript as it crawls, they’re wrong! The rendering of Javascript happens much later (sometimes weeks) and can cause big problems for client-side rendered sites. You can find out more about getting Google to work with Javascript at: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/javascript-seo-basics
Tip #3:
Google’s “mobile-first” index means they are looking at your site as if they are on a smartphone. This means if you have a “mobile version” of your site that has less content than your desktop version, it is unlikely to get found. You can find out more about mobile-first indexing at: https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-first-indexing
Tip #4:
Never use automatic Geo-IP redirection to push users to different location versions of your website. It will confuse search engines, it’s a bad user experience and it will actually be illegal under EU law from 2nd December! More info on internationalisation: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
Tip #5:
Nobody can tell you the keyword a particular user searched for on Google and ended up on your site from organic search, despite what some tools claim to be able to do.
Tip #6:
Adding new content to be “fresh” is a myth: it does not apply universally. Some queries deserve freshness, others do not. Don’t add new content for the sake of it being new.
Tip #7:
If you want to outrank everyone for seasonal terms, something like “best christmas laptop deals 2018”, then keep it on the same URL every year (e.g. best-christmas-laptop-deals) and just change the year in the content. If you want to keep the old content, move that to a new URL (e.g. best-christmas-laptop-deals-2017).
Tip #8:
The words you use on internal links (anchor text) are massively important. Link to internal pages with the terms you want to rank – it can be more important than content on that page! Conclusion from a recent experiment: Even a website, where a keyword is neither in the content, nor in the meta title, but is linked with a researched anchor, can easily rank in the search results higher than a website which contains this word but is not linked to a keyword. More info on that study at: https://searchengineland.com/heres-what-happened-when-i-followed-googlebot-for-3-months-308674