It’s not easy to say what the top 10 best SEO tips really are, especially with all the so-called “experts” claiming to know the latest SEO tricks and “secrets Google doesn’t want you to know about.” It would take you days, even weeks to sort through this mess. So we thought we’d make it easy for beginners at SEO and condense all the clutter into what we call our Top 10 SEO tips and tricks.

Keep in mind, though, that we did not list these in any particular order. #1 will be just as important as #10 and so on. Our goal is not to say which tips are more or less valuable, but rather, to give beginners a starting point in their SEO efforts. These are all important and they apply to any industry or organization.

10. Free SEO is Still SEO

There’s a misconception out there that SEO has to cost an arm and a leg. And while it’s true that the very best SEO services will cost you (mainly because it costs the SEO company to provide it!), there are plenty of free SEO optimization techniques you can apply to your blog or corporate website. You can:

Shore up your on-page SEO
Analyze your competition with free SEO tools
Research keywords with the Google Keyword Tool
Contact other bloggers for guest blogging opportunities
Write an epic, pillar article for your blog that will attract links and visitors for years

9. Start With Local SEO

It can be tempting to shoot for the stars and set your goals on keywords like “Accountant” or “Auto Insurance.” But before you go after these blockbuster keywords, it makes a lot more sense to target easier local SEO keywords like “Houston Accountant” or “Miami Auto Insurance,” depending on where your business is located.

8. 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 keyword is completely useless. No one. And this makes sense for Google, too, as it prevents the 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 very well might take you or your SEO company an entire year. This goes for Google as well as Yahoo and Bing, and for any CMS–Wordpress, Joomla, whatever. No one is exempt from this trust-building phase.

7. SEO Copywriting is Everything

Link-building gets all the attention, but just remember that the only reliable information Google has about your site is the content you write on it. Think of your blog posts as little spider webs, each of them serving to “catch” another segment in your target audience. Let’s say your site is about cars. There are sports car fans, luxury car fans, convertible fans, monster truck fans, etc. It would be impossible to attract all of these different types of fans with a site just about “cars”–that’s too generic. But writing a blog post about sports cars, another post about monster trucks, etc, will help you capture all of these different types of fans.

6. SEO is Always Tough for Beginners

It can be a rough first few weeks and months for beginners who want to learn SEO. There’s a lot of new terminology to memorize (what the heck is Joomla?), lots of outdated information (do meta keywords still matter?), and the competition is getting fiercer by the day. But here’s the good news: every SEO expert today was a beginner at some point in the past, and they reached guru status by a constant focus on improving their SEO game. No one is born with SEO knowledge; it doesn’t “come naturally” to anyone since SEO itself was invented years after each of us was born.

5. SEO Comes Before Web Design

Web design is inherently 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 your web design, or at least, your web designer should have a professional SEO at his side to consult him.

This simple SEO tip will save you hours of headaches later down the line, as it’s an absolute pain to go back and have to change your core web design to make it search-engine friendly. Much better to fix this at the start.

4. Bing SEO = Google SEO

A common mistake SEO bloggers make is they think they have to optimize their website for Google and Bing separately, somehow thinking that these two search engines have drastically different ranking algorithms. The truth is that yes, their algorithms are different, but it’s no use trying to 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 you can’t control anyway (keywords in your domain name, for example).

3. Focus on Link Diversity

Recently, research out of SEOmoz confirmed what many top SEOs already knew: 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 links from as many different sites as possible.

Here’s a snippet of the data that came out of the SEOmoz research study:



What the graphic basically means is that SERP rankings have a 0.25 correlation with SEO rankings. In normal human terms, this means that link diversity makes up about 6.25% of the entire Google algorithm. This might not seem like much, but it actually is pretty important. Google has stated that they look at more than 200 search engine ranking factors when calculating their rankings, which means that the average ranking factor accounts for 0.5% of the entire algorithm. This makes link diversity 12.5x more important than your average ranking factor.

2. Read the Top Online SEO forums

This is probably the most simple SEO tip on this top 10 list. It doesn’t take any special software or expert knowledge. All you have to do is read.

Although the top SEO experts tend to stay away from the forums (they’re too busy running their own firms!), there are still plenty of knowledgeable people who are more than happy to help you succeed in your SEO efforts. There is an absolute goldmine of free SEO tips and tricks available on SEO forums. If you’re paying attention, you’ll be able to recognize the experts from the novices. Once you do, pay extra attention to each of their posts, as they’ve been through it all and back.

1. Don’t Give Up

I know I mentioned at the start that these top 10 SEO tricks and tips are in no particular order, but I’m going to have to take that back, because this last one is of prime importance.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen beautiful websites go to waste because their owners just gave up on the SEO game. Too much work, too much time, too much money, so they say.