A key lesson to apply to pretty much every aspect of SEO, is not to get carried away when you find ideas that work. For example, just because quality is key, that doesn’t mean that you need to disavow every low quality link and only ever build links from the top sites. One of the problems international businesses continuously need to address is identifying themselves as “local” in the eyes of the search engines. For certain types of product and business, SEO sometimes won’t be as successful in generating a high ROI as Google’s paid-advertising platform, AdWords. Search engine optimization should be a part of a website for its lifetime, continuously improving its ability to make a brand (and its content) be more visible and to create a better experience for users.

Write less, repurpose more

There was a time when SEO worked because a lot of big companies didn’t understand how important it really was. That opened up a lot of opportunities for smaller companies to make quick advances up the rankings. Using SEO best practices should be a part of your foundation when it comes to creating content, not only on your website, but with your social media posts as well. Getting high-quality links from outside websites is key — especially if you can find a way to get .edu links. Google sees inbound links coming from websites ending in .edu as especially trustworthy. 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.

Arm yourselves with an SEO strategy

You need to get all sorts of links - not just comments, or profiles, or blog posts. A typical site will get links from all over the place and with all different anchors. You need to follow that strategy too (especially true after the Penguin and Panda updates). Use Fetch as Google to test whether Google can crawl and index important pages within your site. Stop marketing to audiences and instead market to customers at scale. The secret to building a blog that gets crazy backlinks, ranks for awesome keywords and makes you money on autopilot?

Guest blogging was fine years ago, but is not a great way to build links now

Putting your individuality and personality across throughout the off-site SEO process (outreach emails, guest posts, social shares, etc.) makes others more likely to engage with you. Craft your unique selling proposition (USP) based on your own personality and the way you can best solve your customers’ problems. Sitelinks can be a little bit of a double-edged sword: even if you can get Google to display them, they might not necessarily be the links you would have chosen to display. High authority links are great, but in my opinion, relevant links win the game every time. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Social Media is a good indicator of how popular a website is, especially if it’s a blog. Fans of a website will likely follow their social media profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest."

Structure your content

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. Whether you should go after long tail keywords, which are specific and consist of multiple words, or after head terms largely depends on your competition. Competitor Analysis can help you to identify links, ads and other tools which are working well on other websites. Then, if similar stuff will have equally positive results on your own website, you don’t have to go very far to find inspiration and create your own content. It won’t always work for you if it works for them, but it just might. Google and other search engines keep the inner workings of their algorithms a secret. All we can do is speculate and test. The problem with speculation is that if an idea seems believable, it becomes eagerly accepted as truth without the data to back up the speculation.