First, stop assuming SEO is dead because the rules changed. Gaining backlinks is tough, as it involves convincing a website to share your website with their audience. It’s a hustle to pitch your proposition to these websites, which usually is a guest post, sponsored link or asking if they would link to a resource on your site. Use relevant and accurate meta descriptions, title tags and alt text throughout your site. Links with longevity suggests that your site is an established voice for whatever topic it covers.

How Search Engines work?

Your website is one of your most important pieces of digital equity, and one of the fundamental components of a successful local marketing stack. Ultimately, SEO done correctly can land your website on the first page of the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages), and that is always the goal behind SEO. Why? Because most people doing web searches will not look past the first, and sometimes the second, results page when they’ve done a search. So the first page is where you want to be. There have been many minor changes to the layout of Search Engine Results Pages. Local and more location-specific searches have become more commonplace — especially on mobile devices. It’s OK to do promotion to tell people about your content, but if you can only get links by offering money to people or other big incentives, then you’re likely doing it wrong. One of the best ways to get links is to publish original research. That’s not that hard to do. Find out a question that people have in your industry and then do something to answer that question with data.

SEO off-page best practice

If you're a relatively new blog & would be willing to write a blog post for the sake of getting one solid, contextual link, then blog carnivals are a no brainer. Basically, blog carnivals are a blog community that writes about certain topics as a group. These posts then get linked to from an issue, kind of like a magazine. Don't fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to "cloak" pages, or put up "crawler only" pages. If your site contains pages, links, or text that you don't intend visitors to see, Google considers those links and pages deceptive and may ignore your site. Keyword research is an entire sub-discipline within SEO and it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole. How recently your webpage was published is also a ranking signal – but different types of searches have different freshness needs, such as searches for recent events, hot topics, and regularly recurring events.2

Find out what keywords are already bringing traffic to your website

Ongoing addition and modification of keywords and website con­tent are necessary to continually improve search engine rankings so growth doesn’t stall or decline from neglect. A common way to judge the reputation of a website is to check its Domain Authority (DA). DA is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. A site’s DA can grow over time, like a lifelong reputation. A backlink from a high DA website to your own is a strong indicator of your own authority on a topic. For instance, bbc.co.uk, a news site which is trusted the world over has a very high DA of 95. A backlink from a site like this would be powerful for your backlink profile. The purchase cycle can sometimes involve a large number of clicks. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Today, semantic search has evolved even more, and search engines are better than ever at understanding query context and the relationships between words."

Create relevant profiles on authorative sites

Successful SEO requires a thorough understanding of the business itself. Increase visibility to new content you create by sharing it on social networks and building links to your content (both internally and from external sites). An authority website is a site that is trusted. It’s trusted by its users, trusted by industry experts, trusted by other websites and trusted by search engines. Optimizing your website will invariably lead to more organic traffic later on in the life of that website, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t do it.