Guest posts can still be valuable from a PR/community-building perspective, but only if we approach those guest blogging opportunities with the right intentions. Always ensure that your keyword or phrase appears in the first 100 words of your page, if not the first sentence. This is more important than keyword frequency. Websites that continuously pour their heart and soul into all facets of SEO will perform better than competitor websites that do not. SEO has matured. It is a serious business, and most brands invest a lot of time and effort into it.

Is Cross linking bad?

Know your audience – surveys and your analytics software can help you get a better picture of your typical visitor or client. Consider developing marketing personas, or characters that represent your ideal site visitors and customers. Then think about what kinds of content those personas would be looking for. Whatever shows up in the search results box has been searched for before meaning these long tail keywords could be very valuable. But remember these just give you a starting point to work off, people have Googled some quirky things so don’t think just because something shows up that it will make a good long tail keyword. Google suggestions give you a great place to work from but shouldn’t always be taken at face value. There is a massive amount of content available on the internet, but none is more important to website owners and marketers than search engine results pages (SERPs). Keyword relevancy and placement is far more important than frequency. Your keyword or key phrase should appear in the first 100 words of your page, if not the first sentence.

Not all negative SEO attacks are readily noticeable

Make sure to apply a sug­gested guideline of one to three keywords/phrases per content page and add more pages to complete the list. If the content you’re producing isn’t of a high quality and isn’t useful/unique then, no matter how optimised your site is for search engines, people will simply just click away and find a more useful site When improving your page speed, you should always ask yourself if you need all these assets, libraries, images, plugins, theme features and so on. The famous saying “less is more” is still as valuable as ever. Any discrepancies might cause Google to NOT show your business' information on a search result page.

Relevance, not quality

Links found within the main body text of a webpage is more valuable than links found in separate plugins or widgets found elsewhere on the page. There are as many ways to build links as there are types of website. Thanks to Google’s crack-down on creating spam links, many old tactics no longer work. Now much of link-building is good old-fashioned marketing – promotion and PR. Getting backlinks are important but if you get a ton of useless backlinks from irrelevant spammy sites or use “link software” then you’re doomed. In short, success in SEO marketing lies in adhering to good practice and avoiding silly mistakes. Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "Increasing your search visibility is a good thing, clearly, but it takes a lot of time and effort to accomplish those rising rankings, and there’s no guarantee how much extra traffic they’re going to send your way."

Use, but don’t overuse your popular phrases

Google’s robots, or “spiders,” crawl the Internet by “clicking” one link after another after another. They discover new pages and websites as part of that crawl, and store the content of each of those pages in a giant database. A good place to look for keywords is your internal site search. Offering visitors a search box within your site is good for users but also good for you, because it collects search query data. In the past, Google’s algorithm was not quite clever or sophisticated enough to ignore the poor quality links these techniques garnered but that is changing. The Panda and Penguin updates represent perhaps Google’s most aggressive attempt to clean up its search results and in turn, this is having a major impact on the approach that needs to be taken to link building in particular. Content syndication is the term used for the tactical republishing of your original article on another third-party website. It’s particularly useful if you’re a smaller publisher or an up-and-coming writer who wants a larger audience.