In order to stay on top of the search results, you need to develop a search engine optimisation strategy. It’s a bit like having a business plan – it provides a road map for what you want to achieve and pointers for how you are going to achieve it.

The first part of any search engine optimisation strategy should be to optimise the on-page elements of your website. These are under your control and you can find out more on our optimising your website page.

Once you’ve got that done, remember to check it when you add a new page to your website but it’s then on to developing your SEO strategy.

Search engine optimisation strategy tips

Consistency is good. Going out, getting lots of links to your site in a few days and then forgetting about getting backlinks for the next few months or years isn’t a good idea.

Whilst Google won’t find all the backlinks to your site immediately, it will find the more popular links you create fairly fast. Its algorithm takes notice of the speed that backlinks are added to sites – this is often called link velocity – and takes this into account when it works out where to place you in the search results.

This means that consistency needs to be a part of your overall search engine optimisation strategy. Whether that’s adding a couple of articles a month or a couple of articles a day or whatever other tactics you use to get backlinks to your site, do your best to keep it reasonably consistent.

Next up it’s worth making sure that your SEO strategy includes a variety of links.

If all the backlinks coming to your site are from the same – or similar – sources then that’s not as good as if you have a variety of sources.

As a minimum, I’d suggest including article submissions, press releases, local directories and – if your site lends itself to it – videos.

If you can also extend that to things such guest blogging, where you write content specifically for other people’s sites, then that helps as well.

Above all though, keep doing the various things in your search engine optimisation strategy so that you keep the backlink momentum going.