Great content and backlinks are still the most powerful tools in your kit

Like all things when it comes to building an effective SEO strategy research is key! Don’t be afraid to check out your competitor’s sites and other similar websites to see what long tail keywords they’re using. This can give you a great springboard to base new ideas off and don’t be afraid of using the same long tail keywords either. Don't be tempted by the huge numbers for broad keywords. With enough time and effort you might be able to rank for them, but you'd be battling large, established brands for unfocused visitors that might not even be ready to buy. Your domain name selection is perhaps the only area where you can really differentiate yourself. Google wants to know about the keyword usage. You should ensure the keywords are properly applied in the title tag and have properly crafted meta-description. Then, the content should be of significant content. Links don't matter that much for ranking in the Featured Snippet when you already rank on page one of Google.

Don't allow the most rewarding business opportunities to fall right through your hands

The anchor text section clearly shows what text the links pointing to a website has. This is an opportunity to take a look and make sure that the website does not have a spammy anchor text profile. Use keywords in the URL of your page. Using a website URL that’s full of symbols and numbers will hurt your ranking since most people aren’t searching for numbers or symbols. You will receive more traffic by giving your site relevant keywords. Content marketing can be very effective in increasing traffic, generating leads, enabling sales – and contributing to SEO. Even though it is not a surefire indicator of ranking potential, I still hold that it is important to first look at competitor’s DA when starting your SEO analysis. In my opinion this will allow you to gain at least some initial visibility into your ranking potential. At some stage you are going to have a large list of potential keywords. We need to find a way of picking the best ones to concentrate on. Within this we want a mix of head and long-tail terms.

Keep your title tag under 55 characters

For smaller organizations, organic search can provide a low-cost way to build a highly targeted audience. Either a piece of content can help your website’s search engine rankings or it can hurt your rankings. Relevance versus authority: these two metrics are always at the forefront of a link builder’s mind. Most SEO consultants are looking to build backlinks. A littleknown yet enormously effective strategy for improving the results from local search results is by using reviews to grow your organic traffic and naturally stand out among the competition. Within the space of 3 years, it has become significantly easier to find businesses, stores or items nearby, creating a shift in user’s intent and search behavior. Users no longer have to include their location in search queries, such as inputting “coffee shops in Queens” into Google.

Generate interest, give information or persuade

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "If you’re a small business owner, you have likely heard at least one person suggest that you learn SEO (search engine optimization) and implement an online strategy for your business. After all, most people first look to the internet – either on their smartphones or computers – to find any business or service." Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing. Its as simple as KS2 Maths. Really! Performing regular audits on your website’s links is a good way to detect suspicious, potential negative SEO activity. Regularly monitoring of your link profile can also help you catch a possible attack early and prevent it from spiraling out of control. The source of a link matters a great deal to how much weight it carries in Google’s algorithm. TD-IDF means that content should include different phrases and that some of those phrases should appear more frequently than others. If a search engine makes a page request that isn’t served within the bot’s time limit (or that produces a server timeout response), your pages may not make it into the index at all, and will almost certainly rank very poorly (as no indexable text content has been found).

You may get penalized by search engines for having duplicate content

The search engines will act rapidly to penalize sites that contain viruses or trojans. Remember the good old days of SEO, when all that you really needed to have “valid SEO content” was a certain number of words crossed with a certain percentage targeted keywords and punctuated by a few words linking to targeted pages? Keep a list of keywords that bring traffic from organic search queries to your site. Study the organic search traffic in detail once a month, and analyze which keywords were responsible for the traffic. Your brand keywords will normally be responsible for most of it. Try, if possible, to distinguish between brand keywords and other keywords. Find out which channels are driving traffic to your competition . When you've selected your focus keyword, ensure it is found in your title tag, h1 tag, meta description, article text and make sure that relevant keywords are also be found throughout the content as well as h2 tags.

Great content and backlinks are still the most powerful tools in your kit

Make sure that your code is valid, in some instances bad code can lead to search engines not being able to properly read a page. Use the W3C validator to check your markup. Keywords should be relevant. This means your site should be a satisfactory destination for users. Through organic search, you can reach potential customers at the very moment they are considering a purchase and provide them information exactly when they are looking for it. It will be hard to redirect your resources to mobile if your company has been completely entrenched in optimizing its desktop SEO. Like other internet marketing strategies, success won’t happen overnight. It takes persistent and consistent work over the long-term to see substantial results. As long as you provide products and/or services at a physical address or to a physical address, and that address is registered, you can set up a Google Places accounts. By telling Google this, you can be listed in the Google Places section of the search results. More and more customers are looking for a local supplier, so getting this right is a must if you want to be successful within your location.