From a usability point of view, it makes sense to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly as over 56% of all traffic now comes from mobile devices. This means that if you want to keep those users engaged then you need a mobile-friendly website. Keyword research should be the starting point for any SEO campaign. Why? Because if you don’t know what people are actually searching for in your niche, you’ll be relying on luck—rather than data—to guide your decisions. There’s no point in creating new content if it’s not authentic enough to stand out. Even if you come up with an idea from a different source, it’s still up to you to offer your unique perspective that will add value to the particular topic. There is still a correlation between high rankings and the amount of backlinks, but this trend will continue to decrease moving forwards. The modern user has a very short attention span. If a website takes more than a few seconds to load, she/he is likely to leave. Therefore, it’s really important to make sure that site speed/load time is optimized as much as possible.

Take some action to bolster your SEO efforts

While an SEO might not be your start-to-finish website design resource they should certainly be involved in design and usability, and there comes a time in every website’s life when SEO and website design collide head-on: the website refresh. Keywords are still a factor in content, but with the Hummingbird update in 2013, the way they are used, viewed, and searched has changed dramatically. Information Snippets are the block of text found under the main title of a google search result. The use of information snippets are important when writing an article. Make your descriptive tag engaging. Google and other search platforms will use it to create that little blurb about your site. Users often read these before deciding whether or not to visit a site. Concise, descriptive blurbs draw visitors to your site, sometimes even before sites that rank higher than yours in a search. On the web, sole traders can in theory compete with the corporate big boys, so being able to be found – and found easily – among those searches is essential for any firm

Linking Out To Relevant & Authority Sites

Setting the value of the "rel" attribute of a link to "nofollow" will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn't be followed or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked to. Nofollowing a link is adding rel="nofollow" inside of the link's anchor tag. The strategies used to drive traffic to an ecommerce website can differ based on the type of product you sell. Search engines scan captions and metadata separately, so remember to think about how you have tagged and named your original media files too. You can read an offsite SEO beginners guide here. Google prioritizes meta information and headers first, then body copy, and finally sidebars and footers Between 2011 & 2015 Google released random, major updates to its organic search algorithm. But the search engine giant has attained a solid foundation, the importance and number of updates has decreased.

Watch your grammar and spelling

Gaz Hall, a SEO Expert from the UK, said: "A headline is usually the first thing we notice when accessing a search engine, and this reminds us that a headline should be: valuable, relevant, simple and appealing." If over time your site has acquired an average of 5 links per day, and then the links suddenly start to come in at a rate of 10 per day, that could be seen as a positive ranking signal. On the other hand, if the rate of new links drops to two per day, that could be a signal that your site has become less relevant. Using hot keywords and search phrases is crucial to catching people using search engines, but crafted content shouldn’t look mechanical or read like a lecture. Set up a Google Alert for your company name. Any time your business is mentioned across the web, contact the webmaster, thank them, and ask them nicely to include a link. To prove your value and make the most of your SEO knowledge, you need to sell management on the idea of investing in it.

What worked a few years ago is now irrelevant.

Content curation is a common way to collect, restructure, and republish existing content. The collection of material often provides new perspectives for users on content ideas you’ve already covered. For content curation to be successful, you first look for appropriate sources and then use your own blog to purposefully publish the content. Personal social media channels also help spread content easily. Popular topics often provide a lot of traffic. Look at any forums, blogs, message boards or other chat services you might be using. In many of these environments, it is acceptable for users to give contact information and even drop links to their websites, as long as they do it in a certain way. Search drives an incredible amountof both online and offline economic activity. We use keyword research to identify potentially useful queries for which a site is not receiving traffic. Keyword research is often abused by aggressive Web marketers who pursue an endless keyword strategy. Endless Keyword marketing continually adds keyword targets to a Website’s list of desired queries. This leads to an overabundance of content production and production standards suffer. Your first question should be 'what are my keywords?' Excercise - take a sheet of paper and write down the words that you think are important and relevant to your site.

Structuring the entire page

Take a few minutes to jot down some word combinations that website visitors might use to find you. Once you’ve got a healthy list of keyword options, it’s time to see if people are searching for them. A solid place to start is Google’s free Keyword Planner, which helps you research keyword ideas and estimate how well they’ll perform in search results. While building backlinks, developing your social media presence, and other off-site practices are great for boosting your site’s rankings, on-page optimization is still incredibly important. 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 best way to find out whether or not your content fits these desires is to Google your proposed (sets of) keywords yourself. When you delete one or more posts or pages from your site, there’s often collateral damage. Over the past 10 years, search has gotten a whole lot better. If you’ve been in the industry long enough, you remember the days of keyword stung articles and link building.