It’s easy to go wrong in your search efforts if you don’t apply a methodical and painstaking approach that is well recorded and tracked, but here are five of the major ‘school boy errors’ to watch out for:

Achieving high rankings on internet searches is a process based on applying many steps. However, there are a number of elements often considered to be more critical. Here’s a quick summary.

The following quick reference guide is meant as a ready reference to aid in reviewing how well your site is set up to perform well from a search perspective.

Redirect checks - Use a tool such as the one found here (http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org) to check all redirects in use o your site return an effective status code.

You must have clear marketing, and more specifically online marketing goals, in mind before you embark on the process of identifying the keywords and phrases you want to target through your online presence. Effective and diligent work here is one of the most important, and profitable marketing activities you can undertake relating to your online strategy.

Though there are many factors involved in making your website engaging, and increasing the chances of gaining a favourable reaction from visitors, there are some key ones to bear in mind.

1. Colours and Font. Do ensure that you use limited colour palettes and web friendly fonts. Avoid going to wild and wacky with a myriad of colours as this will detract from your core messages.

1. SEO integration is key. SEO must be integrated into your daily routines as part of your online marketing strategy. Simply treating it as a one off project will almost certainly not get you the results that you crave.

In terms of placing keywords in your site title tags represent the most critical element for search engine relevance. A title tag must correspond directly with the content of a particular page for it to be effective, and here are 8 rules to follow to optimise their benefits:

Though not directly impacting on the ranking of your website on the search engines it is nonetheless very important for a number of reasons:

Without a doubt an effectively established link strategy is a critical part of a search marketing strategy, particularly in highly competitive markets, but what is not so easy to determine is how you can measure the value of particular links.

There are some critical mistakes that you can make when making efforts to improve your online search performance. Even worse you may come across organisations who deliberately apply these techniques to bring about search performance improvement.

Though the appearance of some of the elements detailed below doesn’t positively mean that the particular site si low quality, they can be used as likely indicators and should be used as part of an overall assessment particularly if you intend to link your site either physically or in a broader marketing sense. Your online brand reputation is vitally important to you and you should therefore take steps to ensure that you do not do anything to jeopardise it.

Many people are confused the difference between organic search, often referred to as natural search and Pay per click, also known as PPC, or Google Adwords.

The fundamental difference is that PPC is paid advertising i.e. your appearance in the ranking charts is largely determined by what you’re prepared to pay, whilst organic search performance is determined by a number factors, such a s site build, content and links.

The H tags define the content hierarchy of your pages. H1 essentially acts as the headline for the page, H2 are subheadings, and H3 are sub sub or tertiary headings. From a search perspective the engines tend to favour keywords that appear in the headers, most notably the H1 tag.

We’re often asked the question as to whether there’s any benefit from an SEO perspective to obtaining links from directory sites. In order to answer this question it’s important to understand what the search engines look for when examining directories.