Make sure to evaluate your articles in the SERPs. Google the terms you’ve optimized your articles for. Check whether or not your SEO is paying off! While building backlinks, developing your social media presence, and other off-site practices are great for boosting your site’s rankings, on-page optimization is still incredibly important. Links from longer form, evergreen content (a 1,000+ word article that’s been popular for a long time) will be higher value than short, news-based posts. A general rule to follow when creating your new URLs: use dashes (-) between words instead of underscores (_). Google treats dashes as separators, which means it can return results when you search for a single word that appears in a URL and when you search for a group of words that appears in a URL. In contrast, Google treats underscores as connectors, which means it will only return results when you search for a group of connected words that appears in a URL. The bottom line: using dashes creates more opportunities for your pages to be discovered.

Optimize all your images to gain new opportunities for search ranking.

Use keywords relevant to your products and services that your customers are searching for, especially in your Title Tags and internal links. The content on your website must be unique and creative. It has to be relevant to your readers, and not published just for SEO purposes. To create relevant content, research the latest trends and write blog posts that are engaging. Teach your audience how to do something, and always update old content. People visiting your website are likely coming from all over the world and have different levels of understanding and points of reference regarding your topic. When writing, solve for as many angles and viewpoints as possible. Provide rich details, images and image captions. Add titles for each topical section so that more advanced users can find content quickly. Titles also help to naturally break up content to give readers’ eyes a break. SEO is a set of practices and techniques to optimize a website to get it to the top of the search result listing for specific keywords or terms.

Effect of keyword density on my rankings

Authority is built by earning links, or what some refer to as votes, for your website and is one of the quickest ways to rank quickly in Google. This is accomplished by creating great content that provides so much value that other high-authority websites reference it. 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). Find out which channels are driving traffic to your competition . For brands that can’t afford a full-service SEO agency, the mention of the word “link building” is enough to make them flinch.

Link internal pages in your content

Search engines use alt text to identify the content of a page, since bots can only read text. Adding alt text to images lets search engines understand what the image is so they can include it in relevant searches. From an SEO perspective, I never treat a piece of content as ‘complete’. There is always room for improvement with updates, additional information, and various other things that can make it more useful to visitors. It’s vital to double-check spelling and grammar with a thorough spell-check AND proof-read from a fresh pair of eyes. Google will probably spot multiple glaring mistakes, but more importantly if you’re making multiple typos then visitors will trust your content less. According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "The most recent ranking studies show that getting your website higher on the SERP involves more factors rooted upon relevancy than previously exposed. The pages which contain the most relevant content to each query are now appearing higher in the search results."

Beware of exchanging links

Keyword usage on a page is much more complicated these days. SEO professionals used to go as far as calculating the number of times a keyword appeared on a page to try to be in some kind of ideal percentage. That’s simply not applicable anymore and search engines are much smarter at deciphering what a page is about beyond seeing the same keyword used a bunch of times. Mobile sites not only use a different format from normal desktop sites, but the management methods and expertise required are also quite different. This results in a variety of new challenges. While many mobile sites were designed with mobile viewing in mind, they weren’t designed to be search friendly. Long form content is most valuable when it can serve as an extensive resource for readers on a specific topic. This includes long lists of tips, step-by-step guides, and collections of facts and statistics. The number, accuracy and quality of your business' local citations improve its chances of featuring highly in search results.