SEO for reputation management is a process for neutralizing negative mentions of your name in the SERPs. In this type of SEO project, you would strive to occupy additional spots in the top 10 results to push the critical listing lower, and hopefully off the first page. Get a clear understanding of what is Search Engine Marketing and its different branches are, i.e. understanding the difference between SEO and PAID clearly, and the pros and cons of each tactic. Be updated with all the Google algorithm updates from time to time so that your Search Engine Marketing comes in handy! After you publish a blog post, share it on your social networks and then engage when people engage with you. Use it before it ceases to be an enabler of competitive advantage.

Your title tag is your trigger mechanism

Although word count doesn’t rule the SEO world – nobody will read your stuff if it’s not helpful to them. There are an awful lot of people making obscene amounts of money online, compared to traditional business owners by pushing unethical SEO techniques or black hat SEO if that’s what you prefer to call it. Why do they do it? Simply because it works and it is making them loads of money. Your target keywords should be in the H1 tag. Your H1 however can be different from the title tag. It doesn’t have to be – you won’t be penalised for having the same title tag and h1 tag for a web-page (after all, most CMS generate this automatically) – but varying the keyword phrasing of both can increase your chances of appearing for different search intents. Increasing visibility via organic search today means incorporating content marketing, UX, CRO, and high-level business strategy.

SEO is the tool to drive people to your website

Link Building is an indisputable part of the Search Engine Optimization process. Connecting a website to the rest of the Internet without links isn’t impossible, considering the fact there are many different content creation companies willing to do the work for you. However, the costs for this kind of work can ramp up quickly, making Link Building through a third party too costly for most new websites. Search engines use the notion of citation index to evaluate the number and quality of inbound links to a site. Citation index is a numeric estimate of the popularity of a resource expressed as an absolute value representing page importance. Each search engine uses its own algorithms to estimate a page citation index. As a rule, these values are not published. Keyword research is still useful when trying to decide on the most interesting topics for your audience. Keywords can still be part of your content, provided that they are added in context and at the right balance. There’s no need to sacrifice the quality of your content to include more keywords, as keyword stuffing can lead to the opposite of the result you want. It is important to have at least one keyword in your title. In addition, you should have your keywords in your meta descriptions, headers (h1 tags) and in the ALT descriptions and titles of images.

Make the website about one thing

80% of traffic to a website begins with a search query and 60% of clicks (to a site) are generated by the top 3 search results (on the search engine result page). White hat, grey hat, and black hat are terms used to describe the type of SEO tactics used. White hat SEOs follow the guidelines of Google and other search engines. Grey hat SEOs aren’t afraid to bend the rules a bit, while black hat SEOs blatantly break the rules. Over the years I've seen webmasters and SEOs being concerned over boilerplate content, such as repetitive legal disclaimers or navigation on the header or footer of your pages. But Google time and time again has said they can handle it and they don't penalize for this type of content. According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "Earning a link from a high-quality, relevant website will not only help with your SEO but also with referral traffic, which can lead to more sales and brand exposure."

SEO is a lot more than keywords and rankings

Evergreen content. Content you write once, and have it ranking for years and years. Content that constantly brings in traffic and compounds in value. How SEO works for a big brand with an established reputation and a massive marketing team, PR agency and all of that stuff is very different to how SEO works for some local tradesmen with a low-end budget that has to catch up with the big boys. There’s a difference between desktop SEO and mobile SEO, but the goals are often comparable. You want to reach your audience and turn them into customers. In some ways, desktop SEO tactics also work for mobile SEO, but in a slightly different form. With the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and e-readers, more people prefer using their mobile devices for searching the web and consuming content. Brands need to keep their websites up to speed.