User-generated content (UGC) sites and communities are two of my favourite places to find untapped keywords. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, a practice commonly referred to as cloaking. Most people get SEO wrong, because they focus on what they think search engines want instead of focusing on the user. Each year more than 2.8 trillion search queries are made on Google alone. This means that Google answers more than 88,700 searches worldwide per second.i In other words: Every second that your website is not indexed on Google, you miss out on hundreds, if not thousands, of opportunities in which someone might have accessed your website, viewed your content, and bought your product or services.

Auditing Existing Content

SEO is very simple, and unless you’re a very large company it’s probably not worth hiring somebody else to do. Right now, using structured data and rich snippets will allow information from your site to appear right in the SERPs. This way, if someone searches for a recipe, they’ll be able to see the ingredients for your version before they even click on your link! Ever wonder how to pick the perfect keyword topic for your blog or website, or find one that will have the most value? Most SEO strategists and content creators focus on, at best, two of the eight dimensions they should analyze when creating a keyword strategy for a website. Much like other SEO strategies, keyword research has evolved to a level that goes well beyond “how many people are searching for a topic.” It now includes many more variables that help define how much value a topic will bring to a website. Search is very, very popular. Growing strong at nearly 20% a year, it reaches nearly every online American, and billions of people around the world.

Understand which tools will give you easy, intuitive, and accurate insights

If you do nothing else, installing analytics software is the one SEO tip you must try. Free, flexible and powerful, Google Analytics lets you track how many people are using your website, and what they do when they are there. Take a look at sites like the BBC and you ’ll see that they have huge and highly diverse links profiles. They’ll have links from massive sites but also tiny, spam sites. When a site is truly successful, it will lose control over all of its links. Thus, it can actually be useful to make your links profile as diverse as possible. A sitemap is a file that tells exactly how crawlers should crawl your website. For example, if there is a page that does not get linked to your website but you still want the crawler to crawl it then you would simply include it in your sitemap file to tell the crawlers that there is something important there. Although search engines can read text, they can’t read an image. That’s where “alt tags”, or “alternative text”, comes in.

The first indication should be structure

Researching your audience will give you an idea of their interests, wants, needs and how they respond to certain words and phrases. Doing A/B testing is a great way to see what title is most successful with your audience. Study your niche (a.k.a. know your target audience!) and write specifically for the purpose of helping them. If your content is hard to scan, meaning it contains long sentences and paragraphs, it's likely that your visitors won’t stick around. Chances are, they’ll go to your competitors to find content that’s easier to consume. According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "Gone are the days when you have to mention exact keyword phrases a specific number of times at a certain frequency."

It’s time to revolutionize our approach to content curation

Use keywords relevant to your products and services that your customers are searching for, especially in your Title Tags and internal links. Google collects user data on your site and makes further ranking decisions to determine where your content pages should be ranked in the organic results of search engines. 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 In Search Console, there’s a report called Links to your site which can show you the domains linking to you. Take a look at them – if you are happy with what you see, all is good. If you’re shocked by what you find, you will need to take further action.