Discover the connection between content and user experience

Basically, if search engines don’t understand your pages, those pages will fall out of the index and drop all of their traffic. Use Google’s Search Console for guidelines on Site Map creation. Once your Site Map has been created according to the Google guidelines, you should submit it to Google via Search Console. This helps Google know more about your web pages, and gives you more control over how your URLs appear in the search engine ranking pages. It is advisable to check regularly on your website’s rank and positions in the SERPs in order to assess whether your SEO measures are having an effect. But because there are also many factors which you cannot influence, you should not get too stressed by rankings. It is perfectly normal if your website sometimes jumps 1-5 places. But if you manage to get your site 10, 20, or 30 places higher, you should be proud of yourself. Understanding and recognizing how PageRank flows can make a difference in your SEO campaigns. The difference in many cases will be small, but in a competitive environment, every advantage counts. Over the past 10 years, search has gotten a whole lot better. If you’ve been in the industry long enough, you remember the days of keyword stung articles and link building.

Internal links & site-wide links

Nothing is worse than arriving to a site and finding content with keywords strategically (and awkwardly) positioned throughout. After crawling your site and collecting every bit of information possible, search engines index and organize their findings in databases (think of these as massive file folders). All of these databases make up what’s called The Index. SEO is not about one-time actions. It is a continuous optimization process. One crucial basis for optimization is valid data about user behavior. Regular monitoring is one of the key tasks of search engine optimization that makes it possible to quickly react to traffic decline or other occurrences. The entire mentality of a search engine is to provide the best possible result to the searcher that satisfies their original search query. They do this by evaluating a site’s content in reference to the search and the quality of the site and its content. Measuring how many visits your site gets, and analyzing the sources sending the most traffic, means you can see which content marketing and SEO strategies are getting you the best results.

Creating relevant, useful, valuable content

If you have a real business, the same advice applies. You should decide if you are going for a churn and burn method or need a safe and fool-proof way to rank BEFORE jumping into SEO and building links. Links pointing to your site help Google discover new pages on your site. It also, traditionally, is regarded as a signal of popularity. The site linking to your content is essentially telling Google they trust your content. The SEO of your website is largely dependent upon how easily and quickly your potential customers can find your site through a search engine query. One way to approach SEO is to write catchy headlines. Setting up, planning and executing an SEO campaign might well seem like an insurmountable obstacle. Websites can occupy a so-called Bad Neighborhood. This refers to all websites that have been severely downgraded by search engines.

Long Tail Traffic Is Hiding In Long Form Content

We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Create profiles for your business (and include a link to your website) on major directory sites such as Google My Business, Yelp, Angie’s List, Yellow Pages, and other listing resources associated with your industry." Site speed, from the front end to the back end, is an often overlooked area of web development that also has SEO implications. Google’s algorithms are always changing and updating, and increasingly there is more and more focus on the user — with the search engines favouring quality content over poorly written, keyword-stuffed pages. Rest assured that real SEO has nothing to do with keyword stuffing, keyword density, hacks, tricks or cunning techniques. If you hear any of these terms from your SEO advisor, run away from them as quickly as you can. On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.

Cost should not be your only consideration

Social media can be a useful tool in search engine optimization. When you write something new, tweet the link, encourage your followers to share the link and post it on social media sites. When a link is attached and sent around Twitter, real-time searches will be more successful for your search engine goals. When building your content, it’s important to remember to give the crawlers enough to bite into. A hundred words typically isn’t enough copy for these crawlers to read and understand what the content is about. And this content shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords either, as some search engines (as you’ll learn in later sections) punish websites for keyword stuffing. Using SEO best practices should be a part of your foundation when it comes to creating content, not only on your website, but with your social media posts as well. The length of search phrases continues to grow. Back when the Internet was just an upstart, single keywords were the only thing you needed. Most marketers focusing on SEO break down SEO into onpage efforts and off-page efforts. And when focusing on off-page efforts, a common SEO mistake marketers make is believing that their site will receive more SEO traffic if only they can find enough websites to build links on.

Recycle existing content

You may usually think about linking in terms of pointing to outside websites, but paying more attention to the anchor text used for internal links can help users and Google navigate your site better. There is little doubt that good search engine optimization (SEO) is important to ensure your site is properly indexed and ranked, but even the most optimized site is just a voice in the wind if you don’t have an audience. Becoming the authority in your area is quite possibly the No. 1 best avenue towards building that audience. A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (usually the root page) as the first, left-most link and list the more specific sections out to the right. The SEO benefits of social media, in my opinion, should be seen as the by-product of a strong social media strategy, not the core objective. In turn, SEO’s need to understand the wider role social media plays in connecting with an audience at each stage of the buying journey. Principally, technical SEO is concerned with how a website works, and how search engines are able to crawl and index our pages. Think of technical SEO as the foundations of your site – without it, whatever beautiful building you create won’t be as sturdy as you’d like.