Local SEO and Listings

Your analytic tools can be used to find the keywords people search for that lead them to your website. The majority of these will be the shorter keywords but you can also find long tail keywords as well. These long tail keywords will likely be relevant to your website in some way or at least an area of it but probably won’t actually be keywords you’ve actually targeted. 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. As opposed to general web directories, niche specific directories only accept sites that meet a certain topic criteria. For example, one directory might only accept sites about arts & crafts. Some of these directories are free, while others are paid. You won’t know how well or poorly your mobile strategy is going if the numbers are mixed in with the results and analytics of the desktop strategy. Backlinks are commonly referred to as one of the top factors Google uses in deciding what sites to show in a search result.

Don’t Forget About a Sitemap

You can also build a reasonable idea of how many links you need, and how authoritative, in order to compete. To check out your competitors’ links, you can search for their most popular URLs with the link: command in Google. If you want to go further, use one of the many backlink tools to search for the most influential links – a good starting point is Open Link Profiler which gives you a lot of data for free. Google wants users the most relevant results for their search. The more relevant your content is to their search, the more likely your website will be number 1 on Google. Generally speaking where a user is asking a question as part of their search query the results will return a featured snippet. In order to find opportunities for featured snippets we need to go back to keyword research to find suitable terms, the higher volume key phrases should be used as a basis for further research as you’ll then often see better opportunities in the “People also ask” section with more specific questions being asked that offer much better opportunities for featured snippets. If you want to achieve a higher ranking on Google and other search engines, you’ll need to get serious about search engine optimization. Recognizing intent will allow you to improve keyword selection decisions and better serve your target audience.

Make sure your site is optimized for mobile

Video content is a great way to drive engagement from your visitors. Facebook users are now watching over 100 million hours of video per day on the social network alone, and video is becoming an increasingly cost effective format for advertisers. From an organic search point of view, video has a few issues, especially if you're not hosting your video content through YouTube. The biggest problem is that search engines can't understand the content within video (yet). A page consisting of just a few sentences is less likely to get to the top of a search engine list. Search engines favor sites that have a high information content. Generally, you should try to increase the text content of your site in the interest of seo. The optimum page size is 500-3000 words (or 2000 to 20,000 characters). Without considering a search engine user's intent, you will attract too much unqualified traffic. Why do you need a Freelance SEO Consultant Keyword research can be time-consuming, but rewarding when done properly. Think of a sitemap as a list of files that give hints to the search engines on how they can crawl your website. Sitemaps help search engines find and classify content on your site that they may not have found on their own.

Optimization ensures the Website is organized efficiently and succinctly

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "The process of optimization is not a one-time process but requires maintenance, tuning, and continuous testing and monitoring." When Google scans your site for information, it no longer pulls out the keyword phrases it thinks are relevant and pairs them to user queries. Instead, there’s an intermediary step. Google interprets the data on your website, and begins to form its own conclusions about what your site and your business really deliver. If that seems a little spooky to you, you aren’t alone — Google is becoming exceptionally sophisticated. You can’t expect Google to see you as an expert on a certain topic when you have only written two sentences about it. This indicates to Google that your page probably isn’t the best result to match the search query. Besides studying your web analytics data and using keyword research tools, there is another very simple research method: Use the search engine itself to do keyword research. Some CMSs allow you to access the same content via multiple URLs if you don’t set them up correctly. This causes issues when search engines don’t know which is the best version to choose. Fortunately, unless you are being spammy, most duplicate content issues don’t cause a site to be penalised.

More content equals better rankings and more links

After choosing a domain name, optimizing the URLs for your pages is the next SEO step. SEO for your page URLs is important because keywords in the URL are a ranking factor and short and descriptive URLs can help with link building and user interaction. Like your visitors, search engines read a URL to get a clue for the contents of the page. Use your keywords in the meta-tags, web page title, sub-headers and web content. Make your web content unique. A keyword density of 1-3% and word count of more than 400 words is ideal for on-page optimization. Create a sitemap page to make search engines spiders love your web pages. This helps in indexing the internal pages fast. Contextual link building is the quickest way to boost your site’s search performance. If your site uses a lot of imagery, consider adding a Pin It button to allow Pinterest users to easily add images to their boards. For sites with lots of high-quality product, inspirational or instructional images, Pinterest can be a major driver of traffic - especially given that every Pin and Repin of your image includes a link back to your site. Analysing a competitor’s recurring backlinks will quickly give you a feel for their regular content promotion strategy, and an invaluable insight into their ‘inner circle’ of sharers/linkers.

SEO Errors and How to Remedy Them

Most search engines like links of either type, although more specifically the one way links. One way links are more especially relevant where the website that has a link to your website has related content to that of your website. The same applies to the importance of the website page which contains the incoming linkto your website – this can be determined using tools such as Google PageRank. Obviously, the greater the ranking, the higher the value of that inbound link in terms of search engine rankings. Once upon a time, marketers focused on strategizing which keywords to place across their web presence in order to increase their rankings in a search engine results page (SERP). The search engines attempt to measure the quality and uniqueness of a website’s content. One method they may use for doing this is evaluating the document itself. It’s not just the content, but also its structure, that helps search engines decide on the results they’ll display first. Thus, a clear structure with headings and paragraphs that facilitate reading are preferred both from a user perspective and also from a search perspective. Learning search engine optimization can be overwhelming at first. There is a lot to wrap your mind around. But becoming proficient in SEO is definitely an achievable undertaking.