I highly recommend starting off with building out resources their target audience would care about, want to share on social media, and want to link to. Imagine what a one-second increase in website load time could do for Amazon? More importantly, what could it do for you? Try and write blog content for external websites, which will link back to your website and boost your domain authority. Backlinks are the foundation of Google’s algorithm. Panda and Penguin are algorithm updates by Google, focused on serving more quality websites in their search result pages. Panda focuses on thin content and banners, among other things, where Penguin checks if the links to your website are natural links that make sense.

Links, links, links!

The number of referring individual domains linking to your website or webpage is a very important factor in Google’s algorithm. Although traditional advertising can still play an important role in marketing, for small businesses with limited budgets, local SEO can be a highly effective, low-cost alternative to other paid marketing methods. Social signals aren’t an important part of the Google algorithm. But social shares on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ may give you an indirect rankings boost. If your content is consistently very short and not original the Google algorithm is likely to consider the site low-quality.

You only get about 150 characters that are going to show on the search engine results page

There are literally hundreds of factors that contribute to your final rankings. On top of that, it can be hard to determine what kinds of trends Google may associate with your chosen keywords. There’s no denying that a website’s popularity correlates with how high it ranks in search engine results, and in a way, backlinks are like popularity votes. The more links you have leading to your website from outside websites, the more traction you’ll gain from search engines. When you or your SEO Company creates links – make them hefty and serious. They should actually be almost a pain to get, whether through outreach, guest posting, or by deliberating with someone in your network to include a link back to your site. These things, when worth something for real will either take… money, time, or effort. If they don’t, they aren’t worth it. By sharing content that you post on social media as well as sharing your website content people are showing that your website is a valuable resource that they are happy to tell their friends about. Another effect of this is that people are more likely to link to your content and website if they have been introduced to it on social media.

The goal of SEO is to make you money

If you are putting content on your own site, try to keep things fairly uniform. This can help you start building your own following and establish your own voice. Of course, that shouldn’t stop you from doing something that has more of a “shock factor.” Something a little more controversial can draw in big crowds, which translates to a lot of clicks and comments. Site speed, from the front end to the back end, is an often overlooked area of web development that also has SEO implications. Blogger outreach is a process of putting your product or content in front of relevant bloggers and journalists in your industry by sending them personalized emails. The primary objective of blogger outreach is to make website owners and people with a large audience talk about you and link to your website. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Don’t just stuff your keywords in willy-nilly and then tack on your city and state (or region or county) at the end. Remember that in addition to conveying to Google the terms for which you want your business to be relevant, these are the phrases that your prospective customers will see when they’re searching."

Understanding the rationale behind competitor analysis

Links don't matter that much for ranking in the Featured Snippet when you already rank on page one of Google. Websites with fresh content added on a regular basis are given more authority, and rank higher in the search results. Fresh content tells Google you are maintaining your website. Google has spent millions of dollars to create faster load times for search results. If they have taken load times so seriously, shouldn’t you? The focus of many website owners has definitely gone social. I focus a lot on Social Media myself, but the reality is the social media craze has also left the SEO window wide open.