There’s no getting around it. Keyword research is a vitally important aspect of your search engine optimization campaign. Being listed at the top of the results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but also instills trust in consumers as to the worthiness and relative importance of the company or website. If you want to generate traffic through search, it’s best to do keyword research before you start writing. This way, you can focus on keywords for which a certain amount of search volume already exists. Speed is a ranking factor for desktop and a very important usability factor for mobile. Google is very serious about page loading times on mobile and that’s why they have introduced and pushing for the implementation of accelerated mobile pages.

Include bios of different staff at different locations

Search engines also take into account the traffic generated by links from social networks. It is assumed that these so-called “social signals” can influence a website’s ranking at least when search queries relate to something current. Link building happens when you manage to get more links to your website from other sites than your competition. In other words if the spiders and crawlers see that there is a link to your website in 500 blogs it will increase your credibility compared to a website that only has 10 links linking to it. Google just needs evidence that what is on a particular website is relevant to it’s viewers. All too often, when we’re brought in for SEO work on a redesign, it’s often late in the process, such as when the site is being coded or even totally complete. “Hey, we should probably have the SEO guy take a look at this before we launch,” but by then, it’s too late.

Which SEO tactics pay the greatest dividends?

Think of a sitemap as a list of files that give hints to the search engines on how they can crawl your website. Sitemaps help search engines find and classify content on your site that they may not have found on their own. An important aspect of SEO is making your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. Keywords must be used at least three to four times in the page text. The upper limit depends on the overall page size – the larger the page, the more keyword repetitions can be made. Keyword phrases (word combinations consisting of several keywords) are worth a separate mention. The best seo results are observed when a keyword phrase is used several times in the text with all keywords in the phrase arranged in exactly the same order. The goal of search engine optimization is to have the search engine spiders not only find your site and pages but also specifically rank the page relevance so that it appears at the top of the search engine results.

Encourage Comments on Your Site

Links are still a critical element to Google’s algorithm and their value needs to be protected. An SEO strategy that builds your website’s relevancy and authority in the desired geographic area will ensure the site will be visible for a variety of search phrases. This increases the number of opportunities for your website to be seen among results. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could find out exactly which keywords your competitors are ranking for AND how much search traffic those keywords are bringing in? Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "Write proper page titles. Not overly optimized titles targeting a gazillion keywords. No. Proper, one sentence titles that contain your brand name and your focus keyword."

The person with the most useful content that can generate the highest quality links will win

SEO is a many-headed beast. From off-page elements to on-page elements, covering all aspects of SEO can easily become a Herculean task, especially when dealing with large websites. The well-publicised Panda and Penguin updates have had a significant (and in my view, positive) impact on the discipline of SEO. Companies that repeatedly add links to directories are also more likely to be seen as spamming, which raises automatic red flags with the search engines. Search engines reward sites that are user friendly, which means they have high usability. Google favors sites that are not only rich in keywords, but also demonstrate user engagement.