Content (marketing copy, etc) may be king when it comes to converting visitors, but for search engine rankings, link weight, domain authority and intelligent distribution of link weight appears to be much more effective, even when it means removing content. In order to improve rankings for long-tail keywords, make sure that they’re present in your main body copy and page titles. If your website structure doesn’t allow for this, attach a blog or news feed to your site and create content around these topics, with the long-tail keywords in the titles and copy. Link-building can also come from building a targeted and involved
community. The more regular visitors a site has, and the more passionate
those fans are, the more likely webpages will be read, shared, and linked
to. The days of buying, selling, and trading links for rankings is long gone…and if you try to bring it back, you will be long gone as well.
Some keywords don’t deserve their own page
Keyword density is no longer important and you should stop any and all strategies aiming at stuffing keywords into your content. There are a
number of tools that let you check how many links are pointing to a site and what the authority of those pages are. Unfortunately none of them are perfect — the only way to know what links are pointing to your site is to have crawled those pages. If Google and the rest of the search engines trust you and they respect the content you produce, you’ll climb the search rankings. There’s no shortcut to ranking on the first few pages of the search results. Search engines don’t trust your website at first. You have to earn their trust – and it’s a slow process. By regularly auditing your – or your client’s – sites, you can get a good feel for what you still need to do to improve SEO.
Earning links to establish power
The only thing you can do off site to incraese your rankings is build up more links. More links will generally lead to better Google PageRank and better search engine rankings. Don’t try and
stuff keywords where they don’t belong. Yes, still focus on keywords, but your north star for everything you write should be the user. Long-tail keyword phrases are among the building blocks of an SEO strategy. They are used to optimize copywriting, metadata and link-building strategies. Search engine experiences are becoming increasingly personalized. That’s why it’s important for businesses to focus on long-tail and location-based keywords—so that audiences can find your company based on the exact value and service that you provide.
Domain authority (DA) is NOT the ultimate metric
Scan through your website and make a list of all the relatable keywords.Then, make a list of all the potential keywords keeping your niche in mind. If you are already clear with your business/product/service offerings, then keyword selection is all the more easy. You shouldn’t only target 1 keyword, even if you have a very small budget or think that 1 keyword covers everything that you do or sell. This is a mistake because unless it’s a highly searched for keyword, and if it is then the competition to rank well for it will be fierce and getting your site in the top positions for it very difficult, then ranking for that 1 keyword won’t attract enough visitors to your site. 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: "The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors
quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines
understand what content the webmaster thinks is important. "
Find the Right Keyword to Content Ratio
You need to understand what keyword your target market use in order to find you. Have a brainstorm between you and your colleagues and come up with a list. Don’t just stop there though ask you customers, after all they are the ones looking for you! To keep it
simple you can use a link shortener that 301s such as bit.ly, or if you want to spend a little more time you can set up your own site and 301 the traffic from a certain page to your money site. People really love to check their search rankings. Many companies want to use this as a measurement of SEO progress over time, but it is a bit problematic, for a variety of reasons. The more webpages use the same keyword to point to a subpage, the more signals the search engine will receive indicating that this landing page must be very relevant for this keyword. This in turn means that the page will be ranked better for this and other similar keywords.