People either go to Google to find something quickly, or they go there to find something they can trust. For speed, they’ll be happy with paid ads. For confidence in quality, they’ll opt for organic search results. Pretty simple, right? Test the results of changes, and keep changes tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever you're comfortable with. On-page content is a critical component of on-page SEO. Content is what the search engine crawlers need to associate your page with a set of keywords and/or key phrases. Without it, crawlers are left in the dark as to what your page is about. Google has over 200 factors to determine which sites should rank higher than others. As one of the main ranking factors, backlinks are essential to improve a website’s rankings.

Go great or go home

If you're anything like me, then you're looking to understand why certain things work the way they do. Many website owners neglect to spend the time analyzing how their page structure actually looks and works for the visitor. Doing a yearly review of the big changes in SEO and implementing them on your site is a good way to avoid spending resources on insignificant changes while still maintaining a high-quality website for the long term. Progressive SEO means technical, analytical and traditional marketing all rolled into one.

Evaluate Your Site Speed

Think of the last time you wanted to purchase a product but knew next to nothing about it. What did you do? You likely used a search engine to look for online reviews or articles about the product. If the most helpful article was on a site that also sold the product, odds are that you purchased at that site. f your site is linked to from other well ranking sites they consider your site to be important too. Don’t pay for links from other sites or do link exchanges as Google is wise to this and can penalise you for it. Instead give people a reason to write about you (competitions, great content people will want to share, brilliant offers, interesting news etc). While your content marketing should be crafted carefully to meet SEO requirements, such as by including keywords, the success and popularity of your actual content will be the real force behind the rise of your web page in the search rankings. Google doesn ’t want a website owner to be able to artificially climb its SERPs. Rather, Google wants websites to climb the ranks only when they are genuinely valuable and popular with the audience. It wants to see natural, organic links that you haven’t paid for and it wants to see deep, relevant and interesting content.

How to Protect Your Content

Although you may outsource some of the work, SEO is still your primary job as a site owner. This means you will have to oversee the process, as tedious as it may seem at times. You cannot let the little details slip by you. One wrong keyword or a broken link today could lead to a poorly ranked site tomorrow. So be sure to stay on top of things and micromanage your site. At a bare minimum, include social sharing buttons on your content. The barriers to SEO are significant for small businesses. With content suggestions, step-by-step instructions, and the ability to automatically make changes without updating your code, Search Engine Visibility can help take the work off you so you focus on what you do best – running your business. Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "Some directories cost money in order to be accepted into their listings. Once again, while some of these can pass legitimate value, others pass little and aren't worth your time or money."

SEO tactics that work

Many mobile devices have a text-to speech option which automatically transcribes their words into the search box. People speak differently than how they write, using different words and sentence structure. With other voice to text aids such a Alexa, more and more mobile web search queries are resembling how people speak. Visual content has become very popular on the internet due to our own ability to process an image faster than any written text. This wins the first impression and it can be very powerful within the context of a page. A general rule to follow when creating your new URLs: use dashes (-) between words instead of underscores (_). Google treats dashes as separators, which means it can return results when you search for a single word that appears in a URL and when you search for a group of words that appears in a URL. In contrast, Google treats underscores as connectors, which means it will only return results when you search for a group of connected words that appears in a URL. The bottom line: using dashes creates more opportunities for your pages to be discovered. As of now, less than 50 percent of websites use local schema markup for local SEO, so there's tremendous advantage to be enjoyed by adopting it.