While an exact-match domain can still rank as well as a traditional domain, they are at a higher risk for being marked as spam and are viewed as being less trustworthy. The primary goals of most SEO practitioners are to increase rank in the SERP and drive traffic, but they are not going far enough. As visual content becomes more and more prominent, it cannot be left out of SEO. Luckily it’s not time-consuming to optimise your images. If the content isn’t right, it’ll be hard to promote it effectively. It’s like creating a product that no one wants to buy. How do you promote something useless? Analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ryte and HubSpot enable you to examine many important details about your website and its usage. For example, the HubSpot tool can identify which organic keywords are already driving traffic to your website. The same is true of Google Search Console, which is free. These keywords create a good base of core keywords and give you a list of keywords that you can use to measure the performance of your future SEO efforts.

Get People Talking About Your Brand

It’s generally accepted that using copyright notices and legal disclaimers can be seen as a positive sign by Google as these will make your website look more professional and more like a ‘real business’. Even if the social search playing field hasn’t been completely defined yet, one of the key takeaways from the early actions of Google, Bing, and Facebook is that as marketers, we need to start seeing our search engine optimization strategy and our social media strategy as utterly intertwined. Do the main pages of the site have enough content? Do these pages all make use of header tags? A subtler variation of this is making sure the number of pages on the site with little content is not too high compared to the total number of pages on the site. While changing the URL and metadata for your content isn’t exactly using social to win at SEO, to us it’s all the same process. That’s because within our CMS we’ve created tools that set up SEO right from the Entry Editor — before the content is even published. Any time Google opens up the vault and gives a peek inside the mountains of data it has at its disposal, marketers would do well to pay attention.

Promote transparency and foster trustworthiness on your site

Millions of businesses and individuals are competing for visibility in search engines, and many of them are writing what is, subjectively, “good” content. But what makes that content “good”? Google follows links. Links are important. So get the word out. Reach out to other site owners – preferably of topically related websites. If you have covered the technical issues of a new website, you’ll have properly prepared your site for all the great content you’ll be adding. Google’s SEO Starter Guide states that, “If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would.” In other words, including keywords – or at least clear and direct information – in your URL is a best practice. SEO isn’t an inherently spammy or unethical form of marketing. In fact, SEO strategies are more effective if you follow the guidelines set out by search engines.

Increase Organic Traffic

Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "The biggest SEO mistake you can make during a website redesign is to not think about SEO until it’s too late. If you don’t have SEO in mind from the initial strategy session, you’re going to lose what you took so much time and effort to build. " Although Google hasn’t officially declared it, there is evidence to suggest that this search engine giant does reward sites with strong user engagement with higher page ranking. Google hasn’t spilled all its secrets regarding how it gauges domain authority; but it’s reasonable to assume that authority is determined based on each individual page, not the entire site or domain as a whole. Write good content that people not only want to read, but that they will comment on and share via social media. Share your content on your company’s social media channels and other online properties. Get creative and repurpose your content into different formats like videos, slide presentations, etc. If your web developer tells you that the website is accessible from a mobile device, don’t just trust him/her. Go over your mobile website yourself and check if you, as a visitor, can do all you want and need to do there.

You’ll be able to beat your competitors

Data analysis should be the cornerstone of your SEO efforts. Assess how customers access your site, what they do when they get there, and where the primary exit points are. Duplicate content can appear on a website for different reasons. Sometimes the same content is accessible and indexed under different URLs. This makes it difficult for search engines to determine the best search result among the different URLs. The result is “cannibalization” in the rankings. The website cannot appear in top rankings since Google is unable to choose the best version. While you should not hide your heading tag in an image, you should still give search engines more opportunities to link to your website by adding keywords in the image alt text and file name. The bottom line is that if you’re focusing on a small group of generic keywords, you’re probably not being found by most of the people who are searching for you. It’s better to have a custom 404 error code page than to have an empty page — it doesn’t send a good message to search engines or site visitors.

Why are backlinks important?

The content on your website must be unique and creative. It has to be relevant to your readers, and not published just for SEO purposes. To create relevant content, research the latest trends and write blog posts that are engaging. Teach your audience how to do something, and always update old content. There are some legitimate concerns about SEO for newcomers; it isn’t a strategy you can master quickly, nor is it guaranteed to pay off. On powerful social media sites, the hyperlinks you include in your posts don’t get counted as a link that will help improve your backlink profile. Also, on a lot of websites, they’ll have what’s called a “no-follow” link. Use it before it ceases to be an enabler of competitive advantage. The main text content on the page must be unique to avoid Google’s page quality algorithms.