4 Quick things to consider when doing SEO

While it is without a doubt that search engine optimisation will continue to hold less and less real significance in the online world, many people will continue to pursue this method of web promotion because of the explosive surge of traffic it is usually associated with.

Whether you’re employing an SEO professional (for the record – a good chunk of them are liars ) or doing it yourself, there are a few common mistakes which have the potential to untie your efforts. Henceforth my dear readers, here are five basic, but surprisingly commonly overlooked aspects of SEO (in no particular order).

1. Your keywords

When I say practical, I’m not talking about choosing something highly searched for and extremely competitive. The cold, hard truth is you will find it overwhelmingly difficult to compete for terms with a mountain of competitors. I highly recommend using Keyword to basically scope out just how competitive a keyword is. Use the Google keyword tool to create a list of keywords, before sending them to the Adwords Traffic Estimator and then finally exporting and opening them in Keyword Corral. As a rule of thumb (although this obviously varies from person to person), I’d recommend you target keywords with less than 8,000 competitors.

2. Keyword Density

Another simple yet commonly overlooked factor is the density of keywords. According to the much beloved Wikipedia;


Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words. In the context of search engine optimization, keyword density can be used to determine whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

In essence, it is the foundation of on-page optimization and, therefore, plays a pivotal role in your mission to conquer the first page of Google. Many people realize this, and perhaps need to do more to do this. They end up writing pages for Google instead of their site visitors by turning perfectively readable sentences into repetitive messes. It’s really not too hard to fall into this trap. It is therefore absolutely imperative to strike a balance between implementing your keywords into your content, while also ensuring your content remains engaging and more importantly, comprehensible.

3. Your web host

Where your website is hosted plays a much larger role in search engine optimization than you may think. What amazes me about so many SEO ’specialists’ (not bagging out the whole industry of course) is that they seem to continuously overlook this. The fact is that search engines take into consideration certain factors when deciding on your rank and the efficiency of your server or lack thereof can seriously affect your rank. Why? Because a consistently unavailable website may be de-indexed by the search engines if it is offline when crawled. Furthermore, sites with poor uptime receive a lower Google Trust Rank, an algorithm Google developed to determine search engine placement. To top this off, because of how easy it is to enter the web hosting market – the amount of shady and poor quality hosts currently roaming the internet is at an all-time high. You need to carefully research your web hosting options before making any commitments. This leads me to my next point.

4. Your website IP address

Another thing that is often overlooked as trivial is the class of your website’s IP address. Your websites may be judged based on your IP address and could receive a lower ranking if your IP is grouped in a location with some other sites that are not too righteous. While your website may be totally legit, if it is grouped with other not so well ranked sites because it happens to be in the same place, that may lower your rank as well. In addition, the server you choose may assign you to a shared IP address, which could yield the same result, wherein the persons that you share with may come into some bad lighting and this will affect your website as well. The fact is IP addresses are often banned because the website administrators are not following the rules and regulations set forth by the search engines and you may find that your website has become a part of that list even if you were not wrong. A dedicated IP address is, therefore, an absolute necessity.