Identify core keywords
Identifying your core keywords is the most important step in creating and/or improving the SEO health of your website. Using tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool can help you understand what your users are searching for. Once identified, these keywords and phrases should then be used in your titles, descriptions and content.
Create high quality content
Today, the web is cluttered with low quality content and content that has been rewritten several times. Creating unique and valuable content on your site will not only be worthwhile to your readers and encourage them to stay longer on your site, but will also serve as “link bait” for other websites which in turn will increase your rankings.
Meta Titles
As with the meta descriptions, your core keywords should be used within your title tag of each page on your site. Ensure that you do not have duplicate title tags. The maximum length for your title tag should be no more than 70 characters including spaces.
Meta Descriptions
Creating high quality, compelling meta descriptions will help drive more users to your website from the search engine results pages. Ensure that you use your core keywords within your meta descriptions as these will be highlighted in bold text when displayed within the results pages on Google and other search engines.
URLs
URLs that are dynamic (http://www.example.com/product.php?cat=3&id=23) are difficult to read and may not be crawled by search engine bots. Having descriptive URLs (http://www.clickmaven.co.za/services/seo) will give more benefit for both humans and bots. This may also increase the relevancy of external links that just use the URL as the link text.
Page Speed
Page load speed can play a role in determining where you rank in search results. Using Google Chrome’s PageSpeed extension will highlight exactly what can be done to improve your page load speed.
Implement Rich Data
Rich data (www.schema.org) should be implemented on as many pages as possible. Making use of the available schema’s on schema.org will further improve the overall SEO health of your website.