Don’t fall into the trap of writing for Google or any other search engine

Optimizing for search engines and creating keyword-targeted content helps a site rank for key search terms, which typically leads to direct traffic and referring links as more and more people find, use, and enjoy what you’ve produced. Authority is measured by the quantity and quality of inbound links to your site, as well as its technical performance and structure. SEO moves fast. It’s an ever-changing discipline where what worked six months ago, might be completely out of date. However, there are some fundamentals that stay more or less the same. The sites that Google will rank highest for a particular search term are the ones that appear the most relevant and that have the best content and best design. At the same time though, they will also be the ones that have the most trust. Location search is growing every year and we are using our mobile phones daily to search for answers and solutions locally to us.

Convert visitors of your website to customers

Make it easier for search engines to index your website. Internal linking is one of the few methods we can use to tell Google (and visitors) that a particular page of content is important. So how should you go about linking internally to other pages of your website?2 Reviews are an important factor for SEO. They help potential customers trying to decide whether to trust you. If your local business has a Google+ page and is marked on Google Maps, you need to have reviews. The best thing you can do is encourage your customers to leave reviews if they’re satisfied with your service. Try offering them an incentive, such as a small discount if they click on a link and leave a review. In document analysis, search engines look at whether they find the search terms in important areas of the document—the title, the metadata, the heading tags, and the body of the text. It’s worth noting that there are SEOs who prefer using TF (Trust Flow) and CF (Citation Flow) from Majestic when checking their competitors authority and trust levels.

Start mapping your SEO needs to pages

CPA can vary greatly depending on your investment in local SEO, but is relatively low considering the low cost of local SEO. ROI can also be very high, since local SEO targets only consumers who need your services, which means you won’t waste money exposing your business to disinterested consumers. The glitz, the glam, the glorious design elements that make your website look like a million bucks … When contemplating a website redesign, it’s easy to focus only on those features that are appealing to the eye. But to ensure your new site will truly resonate with your target audience (and to save yourself from some major headaches down the road) you need SEO to be ingrained in your redesign strategy from the very beginning. Another major change in recent SEO is Google’s Knowledge Graph, which first emerged around 2012 – this has increased the focus on Schema.org microformatting making content more simply deliverable. How to fix Google penalties. When improving your page speed, you should always ask yourself if you need all these assets, libraries, images, plugins, theme features and so on. The famous saying “less is more” is still as valuable as ever. If you’re struggling to rank #1 for your brand name among other websites with a similar or the same name, a rebrand to a more unique name or URL might give you a better chance of getting to the top.

Why Your Content Strategy Should Center Around Evergreen Content

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "The ultimate goal of any marketer is to create a diverse range of high quality backlinks from various credible sources. But not all marketers tend to achieve this pinnacle. It takes time and patience and a lot of strategizing and in the end it is never that straight forward and many marketers in the process tend to compromise on the quality of such links and end up deterring their own websites with toxic links." Search engines use the notion of citation index to evaluate the number and quality of inbound links to a site. Citation index is a numeric estimate of the popularity of a resource expressed as an absolute value representing page importance. Each search engine uses its own algorithms to estimate a page citation index. As a rule, these values are not published. Meta descriptions are technically HTML attributes that offer concise explanations of what a webpage is about. They can be used on search engine result pages to show a preview for a webpage. They are far less of a direct ranking signal as they once were (almost not at all these days) BUT they remain important because – when Google chose to use the suggested meta description – they are the effective ‘sales pitch’ to users to click on your webpage. Include the right rich snippets, don’t add schema.org markup just to inform Google about all the other stuff you do. Meaningful content that operates as part of a wider digital marketing strategy, with the likes of social media and blogging all playing a part, is now key.

Showcase your social feeds on your home page

If your niche is very competitive, you probably shouldn’t go after the most competitive head terms. It will be really hard to rank for those. If you are working out an SEO strategy, you should split it into two parts: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to all the measures you can take effect on your own site. These measures make it easier for search engines to find your website, index it, and understand and classify your content. Offpage SEO covers issues which are external to your website and ensure an inflow of high-quality inbound links. Keep an eye on organic search and watch out for drops in search performance, attribute those drops to specific actions, and develop a game plan for recovery and beyond. Link building is often referred to as an integral part of any search engine optimisation campaign. A link to your website is simply your website address listed on some other website, where if you click on the website address listed, you will be forwarded onto your website. With content being king, SEO may as well be queen. They both play an integral role in getting your message out and building your following.

Design a link-earning strategy

Add internal links to the taxonomies the post belongs to Google Webmaster is useful if you want to know how many back links you have and who from, it allows you to view links to your site from other sites, and shows you which pages of your site are linked to the most. If you’re an existing business, you can learn a lot from your current customer base. If you have a shop you probably have a good idea of your target audience because you and your customer service team will be meeting and talking to them everyday. Otherwise, you could learn more about your customers by asking them to fill out a survey. One of the best ways to get links when you’re first starting out is to ask people you know to link to your site from their site using a target keyword as the anchor text -- the text being used as the link to your site. Use your network of customers, partners, vendors, and even friends/family around the world to link to your site, and ask them to link to the right locale site. Google places importance on the amount your content is shared socially, they see this as a sign that you site has quality content. By sharing it on their social media people are effectively endorsing your content.