The faster your site, the more Google will favor it. There’s a very useful tool from Google itself to check your site speed: Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool gives you an overview of what aspects need improvement to boost the speed of a particular page. Helping search engines know what your site’s about at a quick glance is where a sitemap and metadata play a crucial role. Google now supports using the rel=“canonical” link element across different domains. This means that you can have similar content on both the .com and .co.uk extensions of your site, and use the canonical link element to indicate the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. This will make duplicate content a non-issue. Also, keep in mind that this is not required when using different languages. Google does not consider foreign-language translations to be duplicate content. But it is something to consider for multiple locale sites in the same language. One of the main reasons a business professional might reject investing in SEO is because it seems to be highly dependent on the behavior of a search engine; they have no control over

Do prospects come to my content?

At its core, SEO is about user intent. Search engines, like Google, want to provide users with results that are relevant to their queries and offer the utmost value. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the best and most relevant pages are given higher positions on a search engine results page. It’s hard to imagine that just 10 years ago, SEO was a discipline governed by blackhat marketers whose sole objective was to increase rankings and drive traffic. Long story short—it wasn’t pretty, and Google didn’t like it. Your site navigation should be present and easily identifiable. Visitors should be able to navigate your site with ease, and ideally, be able to get to any page on your site with no more than 3 clicks. This provides a quick and easy user experience and ensures visitors don’t have to spend an eternity trying to find what they’re looking for. In the past, creating keyword rich anchor text used to be considered an effective strategy as long as they were on relevant sites. However, those days are long gone! Now, any keyword rich anchor text that you create on your own goes against Google’s guidelines.

Replicate the same process with other websites

One of the best tools available to help you measure the success of your SEO campaign is Google Analytics. This fantastic and free tool can be used to monitor how much traffic you’re getting to your website and where this traffic is coming from. You can easily identify pages that are working well for your business, as well as highlighting areas for potential improvement. Google is making a real push to get to grips with any tactic they see as manipulating the rankings in a way that’s against their guidelines – from keyword cramming to paying for sponsored posts. If you have large sections of duplicate text page-to-page – that is a problem that should be targeted and removed. Keeping track of your backlinks is just as important as building them. That’s because SEO relies on the quality of the backlinks your website gets. The more high-quality links you have, the higher you will rank in Google.

It’s time to revolutionize our approach to meta tags

As visual content becomes more and more prominent, it cannot be left out of SEO. Luckily it’s not time-consuming to optimise your images. On the internet, the de facto “language” of structured data is schema.org. Schema.org is a democratic library of internet things. Use it before it ceases to be an enabler of competitive advantage. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "The biggest factor in the SEO revolution is the rise of content. Instead of stung blog posts with the right formatting and wording to make it to the top of search results, users are looking for quality content (not basic or timely information) more than ever. So is Google. "

Reporting and analytics

Sometimes you just can’t target a specific keyword on a product or service page of your website – it just won’t fit and look natural. In these instances you can always take advantage of having a blog. Do a quick Google search for that keyword and check what other pages rank. People make use of search engines for a wide variety of purposes, with some of the most popular being to research, locate, and buy products. If you're trying to get links from colleges, create content targeted at them that you can use during outreach. Trust me, there's usually something you know that you could write an entire tutorial on that would interest college webmasters. Would you rather read 5 articles about one subject, or one or two well thought articles with significant amounts of data or thought process to back them up?