The myth of free and fast traffic

Are you worried that your aesthetically appealing website is not getting you the right amount of traffic? Does it bother you that all the money you spent on developing a very creative website is going waste. Is your online business so vast that you are having trouble maintaining your site and the beautifully designed structures have all gone haywire as your business developed? While we all enjoy seeing the keywords rank well in the search engines, this doesn’t necessarily mean your SEO campaign is successful. Creating an SEO strategy cangive your company and brand a boost in the search engines. Why not improve your ROI today? SEO that works will have to shift away from mechanical tactics and numbers-driven strategies that ignore quality and rely on thin content created by non-professionals who are more concerned with keywords than value. Your website must be easy for visitors to use if you want them to stick around at all. That doesn’t mean there can’t be compelling and maybe even controversial content, only that it must be easy to find and access for the visitor who wants to see it.

Reporting and analytics

How well written your content is and how much it brings value to the searcher is paramount to its success on Google's SERPs. SEO projects require forethought and planning to obtain the best results, and SEO needs to be considered during, and incorporated into, all stages of a website development or redevelopment project. Work with Google to provide your users with the most relevant, well-informed and entertaining answers to their questions. The best keywords are ones that don’t have much competition. Try long-tail keywords — these are three- to six-word keywords that are extremely specific and tend to have less competition for them. Some SEO professionals have been predicting the demise of links for a several years. But there’s little evidence to support this trend so far.

A better way to reach out to your audience

Before designing a website, or even if your site is already designed, you should analyze the site’s structure. Each topic or area should have its own distinct section and flow logically so users don’t get lost, disoriented and frustrated. You need to analyze how your website is being viewed. A key lesson to apply to pretty much every aspect of SEO, is not to get carried away when you find ideas that work. For example, just because quality is key, that doesn’t mean that you need to disavow every low quality link and only ever build links from the top sites. Do follow links are defined as links, passing link juice to achieve a better page rank in search engines as it tells the search engine spiders to follow the particular link. These follow links are links that counts as ‘votes’, forcing SEO link juice and increasing the page rank of the linked to sites. One way to approach SEO is to write catchy headlines. You may usually think about linking in terms of pointing to outside websites, but paying more attention to the anchor text used for internal links can help users and Google navigate your site better. Link reclamation can help you get fresh links by finding broken links to your site and having the publisher fix them.

Think like a human not a spider

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Over the past couple of years, SEO has significantly changed as search engines get smarter. There is a huge difference between what SEO was five or two years ago and what it is today." Many beginner bloggers and webmasters think that they need to churn out lots of content on a regular basis. But the truth is that quality will always trump quantity. Using SEO best practices should be a part of your foundation when it comes to creating content, not only on your website, but with your social media posts as well. Content marketing can be very effective in increasing traffic, generating leads, enabling sales – and contributing to SEO. TD-IDF means that content should include different phrases and that some of those phrases should appear more frequently than others.

The myth of free and fast traffic

Like desktop content, mobile pages need to load fast. Slow loading pages rank lower in Google results. Google has a handy tool called PageSpeed Insights that will tell you how fast your pages are on both mobile and desktop browsers. Analysing a competitor’s recurring backlinks will quickly give you a feel for their regular content promotion strategy, and an invaluable insight into their ‘inner circle’ of sharers/linkers. While meta descriptions are not strictly a ranking signal, a good meta description can vastly improve click-through rate, so make sure you use it wisely! The more your website gets passed around between users all over the country (or even the world), the more popular search engines will start to take notice of your website, and the higher up it will generally appear in rankings and results. Once you’ve discovered your evangelists, think about ways to nurture and encourage them. At the simplest (and possibly most meaningful) level, find a way to thank them for spreading the word about your company.

Don't scrape content from other websites

Metadata has become less important in SEO but is crucial to video indexing. Like images, Google can’t read media in the same way it can plain text, so your metadata should describe the video so that it can be read by search engine crawlers. The most fundamental objective of any SEO project should be to drive the bottom line. For a business, this means delivering more revenue with favorable ROI. In short, you need to paint a vivid, unique picture of your product by not only describing it, but by answering the standard who, what, when, where and why questions. One thing’s for sure though, Google is getting smarter. It’s now much harder to take shortcuts or to pull the wool over its eyes and cheat your way to the top – you have to earn your place. Great content marketing is essentially the bait you put on the end of your hook to attract the fishes. And SEO, in this analogy, is the fishing rod. SEO and Content Marketing work together to not only reel in your audience, but also keep them revisiting your page and engaging with your website (all good stuff).