Keep your sentences and paragraphs short, and break them up with line breaks (white space makes much for a much nicer reading experience on mobile) and subheadings Review your h1 tags across your site, using a crawler to find them all if required. Do they all describe the page accurately? Do they use the keyword target? And do they match the title tag in what they say the page is about? How recently your webpage was published is also a ranking signal – but different types of searches have different freshness needs, such as searches for recent events, hot topics, and regularly recurring events.2 Make sure you have clean, short, descriptive URLs. Descriptive means keyword-rich but not keyword-stuffed.

Monitor the evolution of your search rankings

The cornerstone of a successful organic search campaign has always been technical SEO. Sound SEO strategies aren’t susceptible to the whims of Google and the other search engines and depend far less on them than might be assumed. In a nutshell, the combination of seamless user experience with quality content can have a very positive impact on your SEO rankings. 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.

Quick Wins

Keeping track of your backlinks is just as important as building them. That’s because SEO relies on the quality of the backlinks your website gets. The more high-quality links you have, the higher you will rank in Google. If you make a website from scratch, you need to take a few SEO related things into account. It’s incredibly important to do this right from the start, as that will prevent a vast number of future headaches. SEO isn’t an exact science. Unfortunately, Google hasn’t given us a comprehensive list of ranking factors. Considering that Google has around 200 major ranking factors, and as many as 10,000 sub-signals, we can’t possibly know every single aspect of their algorithm. People continually say that SEO is dead and that trying to rank in Google is futile. Then you get a sales pitch that points you to a social media product or some other type of paid traffic gimmick.

You need more diversity on your pages

SEO metrics give you an indication of the overall competitiveness of a niche. When your competitors have a high DR score they are likely to have been around for a while and acquired a solid backlink profile. A website’s quality, design, content, and usability are huge factors. The performance of a website from a technical and user-experience aspect is becoming a stronger component to achieving top results. There is no single place to focus when trying to optimize a website for search engines, so it is important to make updates and upgrades to various parts of a website at regular intervals, not spending too much time or effort on any particular aspect of the website while other features get ignored or underserved. Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "With content being king, some companies will do whatever they can to beef up the content on their website, including stealing it from another website and claiming it as their own."

Add valuable insight to your content

RankBrain and other machine learning systems examine user behavior to deliver the “best” search results possible. Unfortunately, what’s deemed best for one query might not be the best for another, which makes machine learning very difficult to optimize for. Good formatting can instantly improve your page’s readability. This, in turn, can improve your engagement rate. 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. Stick to these good practices and you’ll be on your way to free traffic.