The online audience has evolved and expectations are high. They are mobile, they are time poor and they live in a world where sharing ideas and content on social networks is just a natural part of consuming online content. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours, and are incredibly important in the SEO strategy. In fact, these backlinks are seen by many as THE most important aspect of a comprehensive SEO plan. A good link profile is not just backlinks. Stated another way, backlinks are just one component of the link profile. There is a deeper complexity to the backlink discussion. To prepare for voice search, you need to take a good look at your current content. Ask yourself, does it answer any question a user might have? If not, change it.

Localize your content for a better experience

In link analysis, search engines measure who is linking to a site or page and what they are saying about that site/page. SEO is marketing. It’s important that it be presented and treated as such, no matter how important a technical foundation is to the discipline. You should also be looking for niche relevant profile opportunities. Is there a prominent industry community that you can get a link from via a profile? If so, these usually go further than general opportunities that would make sense for really any website. Anchor text has been a huge talking point within SEO for many years now.

Understand Why Keyword Stuffing is Bad

Without discounting the value of links and traffic, content is most likely the key element of a website's charisma. Good content will lead to links and traffic. Brand mentions and co-citations are also very important to Google, in determining the quality and usefulness of a particular web page. An infinite number of niches are waiting for someone to claim them. I’d ask yourself where you want to be, and see if you can find a path from a tiny specific niche to a slightly bigger niche and so on, all the way to your desired goal. Sometimes it’s easier to take a series of smaller steps instead of jumping to your final goal in one leap. Social shares are important because they help your blog post get discovered, so getting more shares and Retweets on social media networks is never a bad thing for your SEO efforts.

Think hard about sharing

The activity generated by social media suggests that your website is trustworthy, worth sharing, currently important to people, and is being referenced as a valuable resource. Your website should be designed with your visitor in mind. Nobody wants to wait a long time for a page to load, and slow site speeds will tempt visitors to visit a competitor’s page. If you have not done any link building, or have been stuck in the link building tactics of a bygone era, you’re missing out on a lot of potential search engine power. The best link building strategies take more time and effort and are focused on building relationships and providing valuable information, not gathering the most links possible. Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "Why are links so important? Firstly, links are the connecting paths of the internet, the primary way to move from one site to another. Secondly, a link from one site to another acts as a citation – evidence that the target site is useful or interesting in some way. Search engines view these citations as a sign of authority."

Find Keywords People Already Use for Your Business

An effective link building strategy that simply makes a lot of sense is fixing broken links on your site and on sites that you’d like a link from. Your first step is to look for broken links on pages that interest you. After finding the links that go to pages that no longer exist, you reach out to the website owner and point out the link and suggest a new page that could provide value to their audience. There is an old adage used by webmasters which sum up most successful websites, “content is king”. It’s important to keep this in the forefront of your mind before adding or removing the copy from your site. Web users surf the net in search of answers, information, products, and entertainment. They will leave a site very quickly if it doesn’t give them what they want. Ranking in the search engines can be hard. Especially if the competition in your niche is high. As you probably know, you should start with doing your keyword research: getting inside the heads of your audience, knowing exactly what words they use and what they are searching for. But then what? Having an appropriate title will increase traffic to your site. The placement of keywords in your title has a huge impact on determining where a search engine will place your site. The page’s title should include some of your site’s keywords to increase your ranking in the search engines.