Relevancy score

Record any results that appear to be effective, and re-test them on other domains or with other terms. If several tests consistently return the same results, chances are you’ve discovered a pattern that is used by the search engines. Especially for local or small businesses, determining your niche is very important. When you know your niche, you can emphasize what makes your products or brand unique, therefore improving your odds to rank well for them. SEO closely aligns with so many marketing channels, business decisions and user behaviour that the potential your website will be 100% optimised is slim, to nil. There are many sites out there which promise you quick ways to get to the top of Google. Many of them are exploiting current loopholes in Google’s algorithm. Yes they may get you to the top of Google for now, but once Google spots those loopholes they will close them, and often punish the sites who took advantage. So you could soon find yourself plummeting back down again. Scan through your website and make a list of all the relatable keywords.Then, make a list of all the potential keywords keeping your niche in mind. If you are already clear with your business/product/service offerings, then keyword selection is all the more easy.

Librarians to marketers

Most businesses understand the importance of — and the general idea behind — search engine optimization, the practice of getting a website URL to appear at the top of a search results page in order to make it easier for customers to find and use a business. But the deeper into the mechanics of SEO you get, the less clear best practices become. It’s important to make sure that the site you’d like a link from has a a number of DoFollow links from authoritative sites. Authoritative sites are typically well known within their niche and have a large audience and backlink profile as well, they can also be large news websites. If the website you’re targeting has a lot of links from authoritative sites, then it’s a good sign. The header text, or H1 text, is usually the title of an article or some larger bold text at the top of your page. Google and the smaller search engines can see this and they put extra importance on the words in the H1 text. Make sure your target keyword or phrase is there. Once you have exceptional content, you need to find ways to get that content out there and seen. That’s where social media comes in. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and LinkedIn continually prove to play a major role in doing business online. And with social signals—like follows, shares, likes, Google+’s and retweets — influencing search engine results, your business’s social media presence is something to take seriously. Google offers another tool called Google Website Optimizer that allows you to run experiments to find what on-page changes will produce the best conversion rates with visitors.

Mobile readiness is a confirmed general ranking factor.

As Google has become quicker in catching webmasters who use unethical SEO practices and has implemented harsher punishments for offenders (lower rankings or banning of websites, etc.). Some companies desperate for improved search rankings have found ways to hack into the websites of competitors and implement some nasty strategies on those sites. It takes time to research your market and industry. It takes time to perform the necessary analyses. And it takes time to product quality content. The Google-led open source project AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, has one goal: loading your pages as fast as possible Local search success can be achieved by SEO. Click through rate is a good indicator of whether you’re attracting the right or wrong website visitors and if your website content is what your website visitors are looking for. If you’re attracting the wrong audience or your webpage content isn’t interesting, relevant or useful to the audience, your CTR will be low. As Google continues its journey for the perfect user experience on their own site, you have to strive to keep up.

SEO is a lot more than keywords and rankings

Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "Search-based competitive audits uncover the competitive landscape within the search results for a defined set of high-value topics." Boilerplate content is a fact on the web with many many sites, espesially sites that do rank well and are very credible. Google handles it, you don't really need to worry about the boilerplate content, Google can figure that part out. Your title tag on the SERPs will induce your click-through-rates. Let’s see how. Whenever the user types in his query, the Search Engines will highlight those keywords in your title tag thereby improving user visibility and increasing your prospective of your click-through-rates. Community hijacking involves finding online communities that are made up of your target market, or people that can reach your target market so that you can build a relationship with them and get them to promote your content/brand/product(s). There are domains which are better to receive links from than others. These are domains that are “trusted” sources and have higher domain authority.

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

Don’t use hidden text or links on your website to optimize your site for search engines. Some webmasters will try to make text or links invisible to visitors but visible to search engine spiders. One way they do this is to use white text on a white background. Search engines can now easily spot this sort of behavior, so it will not help your site rank at all. Content freshness matters. Keeping your content up to date helps search engines understand that your site is accurate today. When you link out to related domains, it not only helps the search engines to understand your niche, but also helps to increase the trust and quality of your site which plays a vital role in your blog’s SEO. You don't need to write at a doctorate level to rank at the top of Google. You simply need to write at a higher reading level than normal. Enter one of your keywords into the search box of the search engine of your choice to determine the sites with the top search engine placement for this word. You are aiming for keywords that are frequently used by your target audience, but do not have many competing pages.

One or more methods?

Paid links are links garnered in exchange for payment. They can come from a network of link buyers and sellers, and a network usually consists of a group of low-quality sites that collectively link to a specific website in an effort to increase it’s authority in SERPs. Other times, there may be a reciprocal linking program, where a group of websites link to one another. Links help search engines connect the relevancy of a page with specific keywords -- based on the keywords that are used in a link’s anchor text. The search engines continuously invest in improving their ability to better process the content of web pages Don’t just stuff your keywords in willy-nilly and then tack on your city and state (or region or county) at the end. Remember that in addition to conveying to Google the terms for which you want your business to be relevant, these are the phrases that your prospective customers will see when they’re searching. It shouldn’t be surprising that the first step is identifying those high-value search terms that your potential customers might be using. You can do that through keyword research, which can be conducted a number of different ways.