Somebody already wrote something about you. They mentioned your brand or product, but they have not linked to your website. In situations like these, it is usually enough to contact the webmaster and ask him to convert that mention into a backlink. People continually say that SEO is dead and that trying to rank in Google is futile. Then you get a sales pitch that points you to a social media product or some other type of paid traffic gimmick. The mechanism of a backlink is essentially a vote from another website to yours - a vote that says that your website is authoritative enough or trusted enough to link to. Keyword research is something that needs focus and attention. It’s something you should take seriously. Without proper keyword research, you could well be optimizing your texts for the wrong search terms.

Make sure your website is indexed in Google

Google has always encouraged webmasters to make their primary focus one of providing a good user experience. As the algorithm gets “smarter”, websites that do so are positioned to benefit the most. If you maintain a blog, of course you want the traffic to your blog to grow. But what if it doesn’t? What if the traffic to your blog is (slightly) decreasing? What do you do? Web users want to see what the content (and therefore the title) is about without having to click on it. Allowing the readers to read the whole title in the search results will attract more qualified leads and customers to your site because they will know what they’re getting on the other side of the link rather than just quickly clicking to see what the rest of the title is about. Many SEO experts agree that a website's inbound links will be crucial this year, with many contending that there importance will increase as search engine algorithms increase their attention on penalizing poor links.

Create Expert Content

Site speed is an essential element of any campaign and for good reasons. You’ve also got to prioritize index and site structure when reviewing your technical SEO – obvious choices but absolutely paramount. By keeping the site’s underlying code clean and up-to-date, developing a stable site architecture, and maintaining excellent file and resource management practices, you can help guarantee quick-loading webpages for your site’s visitors. Keyword usage on a page is much more complicated these days. SEO professionals used to go as far as calculating the number of times a keyword appeared on a page to try to be in some kind of ideal percentage. That’s simply not applicable anymore and search engines are much smarter at deciphering what a page is about beyond seeing the same keyword used a bunch of times. While producing incredible content may get you some links, the truth is, you are going to have to do some "link building." This means reaching out to other website owners in the space to ask for links.

Action Plan

Internal links help Google establish site architecture and relative intra-site importance of webpages. For this reason, you should have internal links both on a site-wide & on-page, in-content basis. The actual number of internal links per page will vary & depend on the utility offered to users (once again). When building backlinks to your website, you have to make everything look as natural as possible. It’s normal that a website has most of its links to the homepage. Do you review and analyze your competitor’s website? You should. I do. I always keep an eye on the business across the street, or in my case, across the internet. According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "User-generated content (UGC) sites and communities are two of my favourite places to find untapped keywords."

Use Rel Canonical Tag To Improve Ranking

Before the Google Penguin and Google Panda were let loose, SEO’s could manipulate a webpage’s rank more easily by adding lots of keywords to show Google that the page was relevant. This practice is what we now call keyword stuffing and is not just frowned upon by reputable SEO agencies, but is not tolerated by Google. The well-publicised Panda and Penguin updates have had a significant (and in my view, positive) impact on the discipline of SEO. 99% of people don’t need any fancy tools or tactics. They just need to write the best content online for the topic they want to go after. Acquiring new and relevant links can be tricky, but it can be one of your most important SEO goals. Earning those premium links takes a lot of work and it’s worth it.