For a long time Google looked at the name of a particular website and the queries that were entered and might rank that site higher if the domain name had some match with the query. Once you have exceptional content, you need to find ways to get that content out there and seen. That’s where social media comes in. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and LinkedIn continually prove to play a major role in doing business online. And with social signals—like follows, shares, likes, Google+’s and retweets — influencing search engine results, your business’s social media presence is something to take seriously. 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. No doubt over recent months, you would have noticed in SERP's (search engine results pages) that many spammers have been exploiting this with 50+ character hyphenated domain names, followed by file paths a mile long.

Ensure that you get language declaration right

Keyword research is one of the most valuable things you can do to obtain and maintain high search engine rankings and promising SEO results. For most small businesses, a keyword combination contains usually three or more targeted words that describe what you do. When you’re spending good money on SEO, it’s common to obsess over your keyword rankings. To gain visibility across search engines (think 'universal' or blended search), as well as relevant blogs, forums, online media and social networks, whilst being compelling enough, where relevant, to be shared by the target audience. If the wrong people are hitting your website, it's all for nothing

Number of backlinks to the page

After crawling your site and collecting every bit of information possible, search engines index and organize their findings in databases (think of these as massive file folders). All of these databases make up what’s called The Index. Learn to write good website copy and your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)—think of it as digital catnip for Google—will improve, as will your site ranking. Amazon search and YouTube & Video search need to be taken into account, as search share of voice is given more to platforms other than Google. Because Google likes sites that link out to good quality content, publishing your own curated content can be a very smart move.

Determining the goal for the site

When you run the same query on different search engines, you will probably get different results. This is because every search engine uses its own algorithm, based on various socalled “ranking factors.” These factors decide which results appear in the SERPs. Hopefully your website is laid out in a way that allows users to easily find the content or pages that you want to promote. A large chunk of my time finding links is by looking through my competitor's link profiles. Essentially, you're piggy backing off of their success. Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "A fast website keeps the attention of site visitors and encourages them to browse the content; a page that loads slowly will often drive users away - perhaps toward your competitors."

Make sure your business categories are accurate in directories

Keywords should appear in important on-page elements like the page title, heading, image alt text, and naturally throughout the page copy, but you should still be sure to craft each of these items for humans, not search engines Make it clear on your own Web site that you want links - ask for them directly and make it easy for people to link by writing the linking code for them (using keyword phrases in linking text of course). Focus on building trust as opposed to trying to bend and break the rules. That way, you rise above Google's often-changing rules which are getting better and better at finding people who are looking for shortcuts. Many people still think that having a high volume of crawlable and indexable pages is always better.