Keyword research can help you discover new content opportunities, while it can also improve your existing content. Always Add Value. Add value in every blog post, blog comment, social media update and web page. Don’t worry about backlinks or keyword rank. People will read and share your valuable content, and the rest will take care of itself. Link building, as a strategy, began in the late 1990s, coinciding with the advent of Google. In the early years of SEO, link building was at the forefront, and generally considered the most important tactic to get one’s website picked up by the search engine. The practice of link building soon went awry as there were no regulations and the algorithms had not yet developed to the point where they would punish link-building offenders. Although Google hasn’t officially declared it, there is evidence to suggest that this search engine giant does reward sites with strong user engagement with higher page ranking.

Try, test, repeat

Keep a list of keywords that bring traffic from organic search queries to your site. Study the organic search traffic in detail once a month, and analyze which keywords were responsible for the traffic. Your brand keywords will normally be responsible for most of it. Try, if possible, to distinguish between brand keywords and other keywords. So if a consumer hears a message somewhere and then decides to search on Bing to get more information, many times the advertiser isn’t present, and that consumer ends up taking a different path than what the advertiser would have desired. Keyword research is the process SEOs use to find what search queries consumers enter into a search engine for a given topic. You will find that there are a number of different ways to do keyword research, but there is no single “right” way. It will vary based on your industry, budget, and goals. Crafting quality titles for product pages, articles, blog posts, lists and all other written content is what gets that content noticed by search engines. It might not make sense at first, but long and ugly titles containing lots of descriptive information are actually the best types of titles around.

Optimize for people

Strive to incorporate a small handful of links to authoritative sources throughout your copy. This communicates to your readers (and to Google’s algorithms) that your content, while unique, gives credit where it’s due. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term that gets thrown around a lot. It is no longer a hip, mysterious thing. Many people know what it is and numerous large companies already have a well-developed SEO strategy in place. Today, if you want to appear relevant and valuable, you need to increase the length of your articles. I’m not asking you to pad or copy and paste just to meet up with the ideal words count. Submitting a sitemap to search engines reflecting any updates will certainly aid your cause. According to Google, a sitemap is “ a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.” Don’t put off submitting your sitemap!

Number of outbound links

We know that we need links because the value is there – direct and indirect – and every study or research piece published about SEO says that links are still important. One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO is empathy for your audience. Once you grasp what your target market is looking for, you can more effectively reach and keep those users. Keyword research is the basis of all search marketing. It is the art of explaining what you do in the language that people use, and thus it should probably be the basis of all your marketing activities, both on and off the web. Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "While the Meta keyword and Meta description tags aren’t used as a ranking factor, Meta tags do still continue to have a use when it comes to SEO. The Meta keywords tag can be ignored but the Meta description tag should be used to help entice users to click on your page. A good Meta tag should be under 160 characters in length and provide a synopsis of the content on the page. Think of your Meta tag as a short elevator pitch that you can use to drive people to your website."

SEO is the tool to drive people to your website

One question that often arises in regards to HTML tags and linking is whether or not internal links should be “nofollowed.” “Rel=’nofollow’” instructs Google to not allow PageRank to flow through the link. While we all enjoy seeing the keywords rank well in the search engines, this doesn’t necessarily mean your SEO campaign is successful. Google aims to ensure organic search engine marketing be a significant investment in time and budget for businesses. If you want to earn high rankings in Google search results, you first need to understand how Google ranks its search results.