5 top SEO tips that might save your business

This article will highlight five important SEO tips that you can use to make sure that your website is being correctly indexed and fairly ranked in the search engines.

Since Google's Panda updates, many people have realized that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is important as a defensive business strategy.

In other words, understanding SEO is now important in order to prevent unnecessary penalties that lead to a loss of organic search traffic and revenue.

Top SEO tips

As much as good SEO can help, bad SEO can hurt.

In fact, badly implemented SEO (and this is often inadvertent) could be affecting the page rankings and Web traffic volumes of your business right now.

Hopefully you will find some surprising SEO tips in this list that will spur you into action and help drive plenty more juicy Web traffic to your site.

1. Check Google's index

Open up Google search in your browser and type in the following:

site:[domain]

Replace [domain] with the URL of your blog or site.

So, for example, WSM4B would be site:wsm4b.com

No spaces.

This will return all the results that Google has for your domain, in its index.

Make sure you browse over all the results - or at least every five or ten pages of results, depending on how big your site is.

At the end of the results, Google may very well mention that it is not displaying omitted results. In this case, click the link to make it show all the results, because you need to see exactly what is in the index.

If you find pages that you don't expect, don't want, didn't know about, have never seen before, or anything out of the ordinary, then there is work to be done.

In particular, if you are using a CMS (like Drupal, Joomla, WordPress) there may be stub pages, duplicate pages, or other types of pages that you don't want, and should remove.

2. Test page load speed

Many of the free SEO tools available don't actually test your page load time. They test how well your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is coded and delivered, but this doesn't tell you the actual speed of your pages.

To get this information, you need to use Pingdom speed test tools.

The image in this post highlights how, after extensive website optimizations, and server optimizations, WSM4B is now one of the fastest websites in the world - being faster than 92% of all sites.

Speed and performance is important. Google takes it seriously, and it is one of the factors in determining how well your blog or site performs in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Don't use a poor quality, cheap hosting service to save money. You will only lose money in the long run.

Find a good quality web hosting service who will not only provide fast, reliable servers, but offer plenty of support to help you improve your site's performance and speed.

3. WooRank

WooRank is a great SEO overview tool. It tests a wide range of attributes of your site, and gives you an overall grading to measure your performance (the average being 50).

By way of comparison, WSM4B scores in the low to mid 70s.

Test out your site and then comb through each section of the results, making improvements where possible. Admittedly, many of the suggestions for improvement that you'll see are not trivial things - like get more followers on social media, etc.

4. Webmaster Tools

Google WMT is full of valuable information about your site.

In particular, you should monitor the following:

• Crawl Errors under Health
• Crawl Stats under Health
• Index status (Advanced)
• Links to your Site under Traffic
• HTML Improvements under Optimization

That's not to say you can safely ignore everything else in WMT. But, the above list will most likely highlight any immediate problems (other than Malware) with your site's SEO.

5. In-page analytics

So many websites have top heavy designs that push advertising or other material to the top of the page, above content.

Google doesn't like this because it makes it harder for people to find the content they are after. The top heavy algorithm update has been operating for some time now, ensuring that websites that do not have enough content above the fold do not perform as well in the SERPs.

Try testing your webpages in Google Analytics in the In-Page Analytics section under Content - use the Browser Size option.

You might be surprised by the results. If you feel that your site doesn't show enough content above the fold, then a quick redesign might be all you need to start driving more Web traffic.

There are my top five SEO tips to help you avoid unnecessary algorithm penalties. What SEO techniques and strategies do you use to ensure that you stay at the top of Google search results?

Share your SEO tips, rants, and advice in the comments.