50% of search queries are four words or longer

As long as you provide products and/or services at a physical address or to a physical address, and that address is registered, you can set up a Google Places accounts. By telling Google this, you can be listed in the Google Places section of the search results. More and more customers are looking for a local supplier, so getting this right is a must if you want to be successful within your location. Like most SEO professionals, nothing wrecks my digestive system more than an organic traffic drop with no apparent reason. While doing a backlink audit, analyzing toxic backlinks and removing them can be a lengthy and tedious process, it is worth doing if you really want to see your website perform well in the search results. Google views your site as authoritative when other sites link back to it. It doesn’t want to see a site that is spammy linking back to your site. If you try and manipulate the system, you can get hit with a Google penalty and your site won't rank at all. Successive Google algorithm updates have seen the nature of SEO change radically. Where once processes such as keyword stuffing – cramming words that are popular in Google searches into your website’s copy, whether they make sense or not – may have worked, now they can actually work against you.

Local SEO understands changing attention spans

The search industry is constantly innovating, and it might seem overwhelming for marketers with limited time and resources to try and keep on top of developments. Write about all those topics that are important to your audience. Use the words you came up with in your keyword research. You need to have content about the topics you want to rank for to start ranking in the search results. To be successful in SEO, you need to know a site's mission, brand, target audience, and operations--and know those factors intimately. The only way to do that is to have agencies and clients work closely together throughout the process. Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authority and overall authority across the entire web. Sites may be considered topical authorities or general authorities. Search engines like Google can tell the difference between links set up to improve search engine rankings and those that are from trusted, relevant sources.

Keyword clustering examples

Look at any forums, blogs, message boards or other chat services you might be using. In many of these environments, it is acceptable for users to give contact information and even drop links to their websites, as long as they do it in a certain way. If your site is littered with lengthy, indecipherable URLs that don’t align well with the actual content of your site pages, restructuring your URLs should definitely be a priority during your next website redesign. Wondering where SEO comes into play here? While just like the searchers themselves, search engines prefer URLs that make it easy to understand what your page content is all about. Links aren’t the only factor of importance; you also need to make sure your on-page SEO is up to scratch and that your keyword targeting is on-point. Backlink indexing is important for SEO. Getting your site to rank in Google can be a tough slog. It requires knowledge of current ranking factors, as well as the time and ability to optimize your content for those factors. Any link that you create on your own should be set at “no follow”. The reason for this is that you’re essentially telling Google that the link was created to generate traffic and not to artificially boost your search engine results.

Do Your (Keyword) Research

According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "You should also monitor trends to see what popular long tail keywords people are searching for and make sure you monitor social media as well. There are numerous ways to monitor trends you can use Google’s own Trends search tool, YouTube’s keyword search tool and there’s many more methods you can use as well." An internal link connects one page of a website to a different page on the same website. In an internal link, the source domain and target domain are the same. Strategic internal linking is an SEO power technique, especially for content marketing. Engagement with a website began to emerge as a ranking factor with the release of the Panda update by Google on February 23, 2011 The purchase cycle can sometimes involve a large number of clicks. Develop SEO-enabled content from creation that is ready to deliver across all devices.

Reporting and analytics

Even though it seems logical, initially, to strive for a ranking using high-traffic keywords and terms, this will most likely result in a lot of frustration and wasted resources. Moreover, the traffic that you will get from a highly competitive keyword, will probably be of poor quality. Start as you mean to go on: titles are the best places to get started with SEO. Regardless of what the search engines think, a snappy, relevant title will help attract readers on any platform. Great content marketing is essentially the bait you put on the end of your hook to attract the fishes. And SEO, in this analogy, is the fishing rod. SEO and Content Marketing work together to not only reel in your audience, but also keep them revisiting your page and engaging with your website (all good stuff). An authority website doesn’t necessarily have to be one of the usual big publishers. If you’re a niche website or blog with high quality, relevant content, you can be as highly regarded as any other source. Mobile does not necessarily mean on the go. Studies find that people often grab the nearest device to look something up and in most cases that’s their smartphone.

Great images compliment great website copy

Think of Amazon. They probably have a few best-selling products, but the majority of their retail revenue comes from a wide variety of things that aren’t bought anywhere nearly as often as their best-selling products. Similarly, if we were to rank the popularity of the songs played in the last 10 years, there would be a few hits that would garner the majority of plays, and an enormous number of songs that have only a few plays. Those less popular products and songs are what we call the long tail. Add internal links to the taxonomies the post belongs to Giving your personal opinion and opening up a little bit goes a long way towards creating rapport with your audience. Like many things, of course, don’t overdo it! There’s no clear formula, or single answer for the minimum amount of content a page should have. Some sources suggest having at least 600-700 words of content on every page. Not all links are equal. The Google determines the quality of the links by looking at the quality of traffic that the specific links are driving to your website.