Don’t shoot yourself in the foot with Technical SEO

If you want to rank in Google you have to make sure that you’re using the right keywords for every page. One of the biggest mistakes I frequently encounter is that site owners are optimizing for too generic keywords. There are far more unique search queries than generic ones. If you added up the search engine traffic of the most popular keywords, the number would not even come close to the amount of unique, niche keywords. This concept is known as “long-tail theory”. If you read something interesting on a blog, you should comment. Especially when a post is about something you may have written about yourself as well. In your comment, you can share your view on the matter. You could also place a link to one of your own blogs. If you want your audience to grow, check the analytics of your blog regularly. What articles are the ones that people seem to read the most? Content marketing has become a major player concerning SEO in the past few years. Interesting, useful and original content has become an important ranking factor in Google algorithms.

Test different keywords with different pages

Links are the key to ranking well in Google, but what marketers often forget is that links are built upon relationships with people. The best way to ‘build links’ is to forge connections and offer value to bloggers and other influencers in your niche. There is no such thing as a cookie-cutter SEO plan, and for this, all parties on the SEO bandwagon should rejoice. Type in your keyphrases. At least look at the first page (the top 10) and see what everyone else has in their description tags. Does it look like they’re being pulled from the copy on their pages? If you are a local business, register with trusted local directories. By submitting your company to business directories (especially the free directories) you cannot expect to be flooded with high quality traffic and transform your website into a high-converting lead generation machine. What you should be expecting though, is getting some extra local traffic boost and an improvement in your search engine placements. You need to come up with blog post ideas, and there are various sources of data that can help you come up with topics. Randomly guessing without leveraging these data sources will hinder your potential. So how can we figure out what people are searching for when they are on Google?

Focus on doing the right thing and helping Google do its job

SEO isn’t an inherently spammy or unethical form of marketing. In fact, SEO strategies are more effective if you follow the guidelines set out by search engines. When you’re spending good money on SEO, it’s common to obsess over your keyword rankings. Did you migrate from HTTP to HTTPS or are planning to do so? If so, it’s best to monitor after so you can gauge the impact on rankings and traffic. Keyword research can be done using free tools. Each time you write an informative article related to your site’s topic, you should distribute it to a number of article directories. When you do that, you are making sure that more people will be visiting your site. The greatest selling point of SEO is something that it shares with most of the broader world of inbound marketing: it allows for the possibility of cumulative growth.

Use Hyphens To Differentiate Words In URL

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "User experience is critical to SEO, so it may be a good idea to test how it affects the traffic to your site." Reacting to reviews appears to be a wise thing to do. That does not mean you should respond to every single review. In my opinion, you should react to negative reviews. Responding to negative reviews will show potential customers how you handle problems and solve solutions to dissatisfied customers. Every website has a robots.txt; this gives robots/crawlers/spiders a bunch of rules to follow, such as where they can/can’t crawl, and the pages they can/can’t index. You can check whether a URL is blocked by robots.txt with Google’s Robots Testing Tool. Some directories cost money in order to be accepted into their listings. Once again, while some of these can pass legitimate value, others pass little and aren't worth your time or money. Use the keywords your audience is searching for. Search engines understand synonyms and similar terminology, so using related keywords in multiple pieces of content helps the bots know what topics your site covers. That said, focusing on keywords for each piece of content you publish still matters.

Write a 1000+ words article, forget 500

Ensure that your site is set to load at either www.domainname.co.uk or domainname.co.uk – not both. There is a technical difference between the two, but for most people it shouldn’t matter either way as far as you stick with your preference and redirect the non-preferred to your preferred one. Google defines duplicate content as large blocks of text used across multiple pages, or even other websites, that are exactly the same or very similar. Simply put, you don’t want to use large blocks of the same text on more than one page of your website. While your content marketing should be crafted carefully to meet SEO requirements, such as by including keywords, the success and popularity of your actual content will be the real force behind the rise of your web page in the search rankings. Make a list of the top 10 business directories and build an engaging, content-rich business profiles on each of them. Another “old school” method of building up your backlinks is to make use of Forum Posting. It is a quick, easy and sometimes even fun way to get your links out and maybe even have someone directly click on them which is always a good thing.

Longtail terms

One of the main ways to increase SEO traffic is to experiment with the meta title and meta description you have on your page. Flexing this can increase your clickthrough rate from the search engine results page, and can affect what keywords you rank for. The search engines tend to give pages with longer, more in-depth content a higher placement on SERPs. Site speed, from the front end to the back end, is an often overlooked area of web development that also has SEO implications. Keyword research is an entire sub-discipline within SEO and it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole. See what keywords are most popular in each country you’re targeting, and optimise the pages on that country’s section of your website accordingly. Also, remember that even a correct and accurate translation of a keyword or term may not be what people actually use to search for a product or service locally.