Link building happens when you manage to get more links to your website from other sites than your competition. In other words if the spiders and crawlers see that there is a link to your website in 500 blogs it will increase your credibility compared to a website that only has 10 links linking to it. Gaining backlinks is tough, as it involves convincing a website to share your website with their audience. It’s a hustle to pitch your proposition to these websites, which usually is a guest post, sponsored link or asking if they would link to a resource on your site. SEO is also not a public relation activity, even when it includes all elements of branding, crafting, and reputation building. Search engine optimization might sound a little challenging, but it is very basic, fundamental, and simply designed to retain customers. Your SEO strategy might include links to other websites or pages within your own website. Sometimes pages are no longer available and content is permanently removed from a website. When that happens, website visitors land on a 404 error page. Double-check the links on your website to ensure pages haven’t been taken down without your knowledge.

What is with this hue & cry about backlinks?

It’s easy to assume that Google already understands the content and relevance of each and every page on your website, but the fact is that it needs a fair amount of hand-holding. Fortunately, helping Google along really isn’t very difficult at all. Search volume refers to how many times a particular phrase is searched for. It’s a handy way to gauge how much traffic you’ll receive from a specific query, though you should know that volume tends to fluctuate over time. Chances are, there are a number of sites that cover topic areas similar to yours. Opening up communication with these sites is usually beneficial. Hot topics in your niche or community could spark additional ideas for content or building a good community resource. Remember, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to optimization strategies. For the most part, you’ll be relying on trial and error to pinpoint what works and what doesn’t for your brand.

Measure and Improve

Just because long form content is meant to be educational and informative, doesn’t mean it has to be dry. Incorporating humor and writing in a conversational tone are strategies for making long form content more readable and interesting. While your company may have a budget too small to implement a broad range of SEO services and strategies, investing in one or two things is a great start. It is certainly better than not investing at all in internet marketing. The basic premise is that a page will show up in search engine results because the website had mentioned the terms that were being searched for on the website page. Of course, many websites use the same keywords on the same page. All your citations (an online reference to your business including your NAP) need to be consistent, so as you start building them (see below), make sure that firstly, your NAP is correct, and the same (so Google & Bing can see the connection).

Concentrate on actionable content

When building your content, it’s important to remember to give the crawlers enough to bite into. A hundred words typically isn’t enough copy for these crawlers to read and understand what the content is about. And this content shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords either, as some search engines (as you’ll learn in later sections) punish websites for keyword stuffing. Permalinks are the permanent URLs for your web pages, posts, categories and tag archives. It is the web address used to link to your individual blog post and web page. By default, permalinks look something like this: https://yoursite.com/p?=17 This structure makes it difficult for search engine crawlers to read and index your web pages and posts. That means you will need to make it more accessible for both search engines and we visitors. Onpage optimization (AKA on-page SEO) refers to all measures that can be taken directly within the website in order to improve its position in the search rankings. According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "The proliferation of smartphones and tablets mean more and more consumers will be viewing your website on the much smaller screen of a mobile device. For a good user experience, make sure your website is mobile responsive, rendering correctly on a desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone."

Be mindful of structure

Create a list of the top 10 keywords for which you want to achieve rankings. Do a search once a month on Google and see where you stand in the rankings. Keep a record of the ranking and you will be able to see the progress of your SEO efforts. Note jumps by more than five places in the ranking, because these changes are not usually due just to normal changes and search engine updates. Term weighting refers to the importance of a particular search term to the query. The idea is to weight particular terms more heavily than others to produce superior search results. Stop using keywords in your URLs. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a page without slamming keywords into the URLs, you don’t know how to optimize a Web page. There are many places across the web where you can build links through submissions, whether it’s submitting your site, a piece of content, or anything else.