Add a Pin It plugin to your site

Researching your audience will give you an idea of their interests, wants, needs and how they respond to certain words and phrases. Doing A/B testing is a great way to see what title is most successful with your audience. Because people have shorter attention spans, keep the most important information in heading tags so they can scan and see if they want to delve deeper into the post. Wouldn’t it be great to give Google & Bing a list of all the pages we want them to notice? With XML sitemaps you can do just that. This is a file you add to your website (normally at yourdomain.uk/sitemap.xml) that lists the URLs for a site. Most CMSs can create one automatically for you, and let you choose to remove certain pages. People don’t read on the web; they scan. To make scanning easier, use plenty of clear and informative sub-headers to guide readers down a page. If you own a website that’s been around for a while, you should already be ranking in Google for a few hundred keywords. Knowing what they are is a perfect way to kick-start your keyword research.

On page optimization techniques for better rankings

SEO today is increasingly driven by natural language search, that is, people doing searches that are more like normal questions than two or three keywords. The number of referring individual domains linking to your website or webpage is a very important factor in Google’s algorithm. is of primary importance to have relevant backlinks coming in to your website. Mind you! The links should have relevancy to the content of your page. The more the number of relevant backlinks coming in to your website, the more importance and authority you have in the eyes of search engines. Therefore, backlinks becomes an important factor in determining where the page appears in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). The absence of a hard and fast definition of content allows for cross-genre experiments. Infographics, explainer videos, vlogs are products of such experiments. Visual images entertain users whereas written content provide them with new information. Infographics, which is the cross between the two, do both. The same applies to explainer videos. When you’re spending good money on SEO, it’s common to obsess over your keyword rankings.

Monitor the evolution of your search engine rankings

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, the content will play a huge role in your rankings. As they say, “Content is King, Link Building is Queen”. Remember, all the hard work you do in building up your links will be for naught if your content is garbage. The days of stuffing keywords into bad content and having it rank are long gone. Now your content needs to focus on your target persona and your keywords need to flow within the content. While developing your mobile site, you’ll have three options: responsive design, dynamic serving and a separate site on a subdomain. Google prefers responsive design. This way, you have one site that adapts to the device it’s used on. Most SEO consults cover a local area. The number and quality of links to your website are quite important to Google and other search engines for your rank on different terms. You should aim to increase inbound links from sites of the same country. Get sites in the UK to link to your co.uk extension, sites in Ireland to link to your .ie extension, etc. SEO isn’t an exact science. Unfortunately, Google hasn’t given us a comprehensive list of ranking factors. Considering that Google has around 200 major ranking factors, and as many as 10,000 sub-signals, we can’t possibly know every single aspect of their algorithm.

Use Semantic Markup To Improve Ranking

According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "We all know that getting backlinks (a.k.a. inbound links) from trusted websites is a great way to give your website’s search rankings a boost. However, there’s also a dark side to backlinks. If Google suspects that there are spammy, low-quality sites linking to your site, your rankings could suffer. This is known as “negative SEO”. (In some cases, spammers will purposely direct lots of low-quality links to your site in order to cause negative SEO.)" If your meta description is a duplicate, the user experience in Google will be less. Although page titles might vary, all pages seem the same as all descriptions are equal. SEO is a great way to put your hands up in the air and tell potential customers that your business exists and has a web presence among the thousands of competing pages and the competitor businesses behind them. Google has guidelines that regulate the use of keywords and regularly updates its algorithms to regulate the industry. The best part about SEO is that when you start ranking higher on SERPs, you get more exposure, i.e. more clicks, more visits, more links and more mentions on social media. This is a chain of events which takes place one after another.

Is Keyword Research an important player in the game of SEO?

These days, directory links are unlikely to generate a torrent of traffic but they're a good way to build external links to your site. Additionally, links from specialized directories in your niche will bring in a steady stream of targeted visitors and help reinforce the topic of your site with Google. Importantly, Google is now looking for ways to improve its understanding of non-written words such as through videos and audios, and of course, images. Search engines scour the Internet to find keywords and clues to match search results, but if your website isn’t giving them the right clues, your SEO efforts will take a dive. Ultimately understanding your audience, competition and keyword options will play a major role in your website’s SEO potential. Blogging is a great way to stay up to date while easily generating new, relevant content. Blogging regularly (ideally once a week at a minimum) can have significant implications for search engine optimization, since each new blog entry represents a new web page. Search engines have been tailored to predict the intent of customers, which explains why some searches have features such as local 3-packs, featured images or videos and Quick Answers. Understanding the intent behind searches allows marketers to create content messages and formats that will most likely appeal to customers.

Focus keywords and focus keyphrases

The Internet is made up of trillions of pages that are all connected to one another with links. These links are how search engines “crawl” the web, using virtual spiders (or bots). As these spiders follow the links on pages to other pages, they store information as they go. And they don’t miss a beat! From search terms to images and videos, these bots survey, collect and take note of any information they can get their spindly little hands on. If your website code is not search engine friendly, then the search engines cannot read your valuable content targeting specific keywords. If you do not have worthy content that contributes to the wealth of knowledge that is the Internet, then you probably are not going to earn backlinks or social share activity. Backlinks and social media activity act as votes of confidence from external sources praising your content. They heavily influence a web page’s ability to rank for a target keyword. Keywords and link building are no longer as impactful as they once were; now, it’s all about creating valuable content. Google and other search engines are switching gears to focus on the relevance of the information you provide on your site. The “bots” that determine your site’s search engine ranking are crawling the web in search of sites that are conversational and have valuable content. (Not to creep you out, but Google’s system is critiquing your site like an extremely intelligent superhuman would.) You should also be looking for niche relevant profile opportunities. Is there a prominent industry community that you can get a link from via a profile? If so, these usually go further than general opportunities that would make sense for really any website. Keyword stuffing occurs when too many variations of the same phrase are shoehorned to fit into important ranking factors, such as URLs, meta titles and descriptions, image alt text and body copy. This practice can significantly impair the user experience as the website is sculpted solely for search engines and not real people.