Ethical SEO - Top tips part 1

Ethical search engine optimisation is all about creating the best journey for your users, from the moment they type a keyword in to Google, through to a transaction on your website. Often a user’s first impression of your brand will come from your presence on Google’s search results page. This means you need to consider not just the position your site has in keyword rankings, but more importantly, what those keywords are and what the users who will be searching for them are really looking for.


Successful Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) needs to engage users as well as search bots.


1. Use Google’s free tools
If you have not already set up an Analytics account, make one. Analytics is a brilliant free tool for tracking how well your site is performing and allows you to measure the changes you make to your site to discover what works best for your users. Google has some other great free tools that can be used to help you understand your users and monitor your site’s performance.


Google webmaster tools can be customised to sit on an iGoogle page so they are always quickly accessible and can even display any inbound links to your site. This is a great indicator of the quality of the content on your site. Lots of links coming to your site shows Google that it has valuable content and users are finding what they are looking for.

Find out more:
Google Anayltics
Google Webmaster Tools

2. Monitor your users’ behavior
Whether you have Analytics running on your site or something more advanced, you need to monitor the results carefully. Pay attention to the detail in the reports and ask yourself what the reasons for your user’s behavior could be. If you have pages that have a high bounce rate try to work out why. Does the page offer the user ways to find what they want? Is the user given the information they are looking for in a clear and easy to find way? Can the user do what they want? Try to solve these problems as high bounce rates and few page views indicate to search engines that users are not satisfied with the content on the page and this will negatively affect your rank over time.


If you have particularly poor results usability testing may be able to show you where the problems lie, both in your results on search engines and on the pages users land on. Eye tracking could give you the hard evidence of what your users are looking at and what they are missing.

Find out more:
Usability testing


3. Meta tags still matter
Write unique HTML meta tags for EVERY page of the site. Make sure each page has a title that has a keyword in it and that the keywords meta tags are carefully composed. In the keywords meta tag its recommended that you use 7 - 8 keywords per page and write them in order of importance where the most important keyword comes first. Aside from the homepage, brand names should come last.


This can be difficult to do unless you have great information architecture as your pages may not be working together as effectively as they could do. If you are having problems writing less than 7 keywords for a page a review of your IA and site structure could be needed.

Find out more:
Information architecture


Read ethical SEO top tips part 2.