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. The entire mentality of a search engine is to provide the best possible result to the searcher that satisfies their original search query. They …

Search engines want to show the best content based on context relevance, authority of the site, trustworthiness based on how other sites and people engage with the site, and other factors. It’s better to have a custom 404 error code page than to have an empty page — it doesn …

Your website won’t be found if people have to search too hard for it. “Ranking” for specific keywords relating to your industry and services is the first step in this process. When customers see their searched-for terms in your title and meta description, they will be more likely to …

Standard engagement behaviours on SERP results, such as click-throughs and time on page, can be an indicator of freshness and relevance. The search engines must execute multiple tasks very well to provide relevant search results. Keep your sentences and paragraphs short, and break them up with line breaks (white space …

Creative, interesting, and informational articles that really speak to an audience are much more likely to get shared, repinned, and re-tweeted. The best way to tap into that type of influence is to keep things relevant and specific. The information you are putting out there should actually help people by …

If your site is regularly updated it shows Google the site is still active, kept up to date and worth them directing people to. Having a news section or blog on your site is an easy way to do this. Getting your content out there and shared generously should be …

The purchase cycle can sometimes involve a large number of clicks. A good resource is more than just a long-form 1500 word blog post. It deep dives into topics and can stretch on for pages, combining data and insight that your audience would be hard pressed to find anywhere else …

Finding a good balance between the various “free” forms of building Back Links and the Pay Per Click advertising many people are using today is key to getting your Back Links covered. Using a variety of free online tools such as Google AdWords, Keyword Keg and Bing Ads, website owners …

Updating content across a site should be a priority as Google rewards fresher content for certain searches. A mobile strategy is not simply making minor changes to the desktop SEO strategy in hopes of making it compatible with mobile. The more your website gets passed around between users all over …

The biggest challenge with SEO is that it’s ambiguous territory—but you shouldn’t let the uncertainty get the best of you. Understand that almost every marketer is exactly where you are now. Everyone’s trying to figure out SEO’s ‘hidden secrets’ with little direction. If a search …

The truth is that working on the search optimisation for your website is not a guaranteed source of traffic. The images that you upload to a webpage also have an impact on SEO. It’s important that your files have relevant titles, relevant Alternative Text and aren’t so big …

It doesn’t take hundreds to see the needle move, especially with Google’s ever-improving ability to detect low quality and manipulative links. How are you going to ensure that your site stands out, that it’s set apart from all of the other existing sites? This is the key …

Low-quality links can lead to a higher bounce rate and click-through rates, which can eventually degrade the ranking of your site on search engines. As brands across industries continue to see the impact that organic search can have on their growth, search engine optimization has come from humble beginnings to …

Mobile friendliness is an important ranking factor for search rankings. More and more users are using their mobile devices to surf the internet. In some areas, over 70% of users visit websites on mobile. What does this mean for you? Every sitepage should be optmized for mobile. Every. Single. One …

SEO strategies are most effective when implemented consistently and methodically. To begin with, you have to decide the initial goals you wish to achieve by instituting SEO. Whether you want to attract more visitors, gain more viewers for your blog, acquire new prospects or increase conversion. Don’t get fooled …

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the work involved to improve a website and promote it to increase visibility on search engines, which usually translates into an increase in organic visitor traffic relevant to your website. Additionally, it’s the application of using each search engine’s best practices to optimize …

Google will bring people to your website, but engagement can help return visitors and for instance sales promotions. You can stop improving certain pages, but the site as a whole can always be improved. SEO allows you to capture demand when a searcher may not even be familiar with your …

When it comes to long-term SEO strategies, there are so many tactics to consider. By highlighting your website, you help Google better understand your site’s data. Data highlighter allows you to highlight parts of your website through Google Webmaster Tools, without having to make any code changes. For a …

Whether you purchase a separate domain (recommended) for your blog, or host it on a blogging service or a subdomain of your own site, try to ensure that your URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for. Despite previous assumptions, a link from a 301 redirected page shouldn …

How do you educate people so they do value it? If your website is trying to rank quickly for a specific topic, and yet there is not a piece of high-value content that addresses that topic, the probability of showing up in the Google search results is small. No follow …

A great and fast way to convey your goal is by using headlines and taglines. You can reach out to higher trafficked websites that people in your prime demographic are reading, and ask if you can write a blog post for them. Create a quality piece of valuable content and …

The only way unethical SEO techniques are ever going to be eradicated is when Google themselves get clever enough to work out how to tweak their algorithm to ensure these tactics no longer work. Don’t get me wrong. Google have come a long way during the past few years …

Instead of writing on-page copy for the sole purpose of repeating a keyword multiple times, you should write about your product or service or idea naturally, and let your keyword variations naturally fall into place. If that doesn’t happen, go back and spring in some variations into the content …

Although the top-level domain isn’t necessarily considered a factor, some people believe obtaining a link from .edu or .gov domains can carry more weight than others. This may be because these sorts of websites have high authority anyway. What we need to understand is that search engine optimization begins …

Contextual link building is the quickest way to boost your site’s search performance. Apart from knowing which search terms people use, you need to know whether or not your idea for your post or page fits the desires and expectations of the people who use the search terms. The …

Alt attributes are the text alternatives to your image which will appear if your image fails to load, or if the user is accessing your site with an assistive device such as a screenreader. Because web crawlers don’t have eyes, they’re also what search engines “see” instead of …

Make sure content is not buried inside rich media (Adobe Flash Player, JavaScript, Ajax) and verify that rich media doesn't hide links from crawlers. Search engines scan captions and metadata separately, so remember to think about how you have tagged and named your original media files too. It helps the …

It’s all very well to know what problems you can look for and fix to improve the stability of your rankings. However, as with everything, prevention is better than cure. Once you’ve identified and fixed the SEO elements causing your problems, whether they are issues described in this …

I think that ranking number one these days, is more about market share and visibility than just ranking number one for an industry term. HTTPS secures the connection to the website you are visiting. I’m sure you have seen this in action; look at the address bar in the …

Modern SEO is about so much more than keywords and meta tags. Choose your keywords carefully, and keep user intent as your primary goal. A page’s title tag is the clickable text that appears in search results. Though easily overlooked, it’s one of the most important factors in …

It’s worth noting that there are SEOs who prefer using TF (Trust Flow) and CF (Citation Flow) from Majestic when checking their competitors authority and trust levels. Google hasn’t spilled all its secrets regarding how it gauges domain authority; but it’s reasonable to assume that authority is …

ou know SEO is a vital element of every decent marketing strategy, something you can’t do without. But you don’t know where to start to implement best practice and optimise your web presence so search engines can do a proper job of ranking and rating it. Without discounting …

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 …

f someone is more actively seeking something then it’s more likely they’ll search longer strings of words, meaning that you will target people who will be more willing to engage with your content. If you’re selling goods or services, then targeting long tail keyword can really make …

Focus on producing content on your site that educates and engages your prospective customers so they keep coming back to learn more. It appears that when attempting to improve search engine ranking for a web-site, a position in the top six of the search engine results page has never been …

Google is trying to better understand the semantic meanings of words by looking at how they appear in knowledge bases on the web, and understanding the properties associated with them from those knowledge bases, and also looking at the words that tend to co-occur on pages that rank highly for …

When consumers search vocally, their queries are hugely different from how they write them out. The most noticeable aspect of this is that voice search produces many long-tail keyword queries. In the early days of SEO, it was the quantity, not quality of links that mattered. “Link building” consisted of …

Great images compliment great website copy, and since millions of people search for images online, they play an important role in your on-page SEO. Similar to title tags, using customized image tags will help describe the subject of an image. Search engines reward sites that are user friendly, which means …

It is useful to come up with a link building strategy that will help other sources discover your content and feature it if they find it relevant enough for their target audience – without losing sight of the need to create valuable content, of course. Google is looking to reward sites …

Organic results are listings of web pages that appear as a result of the search engine’s algorithm and the content itself. Instead of looking for one-off guest blogging opportunities the entire time, look for opportunities that could win you regular contributions to a single blog or your own column …