Having a few 404 errors will not ruin your rankings completely, but they can lower your user experience, which ultimately can affect your SEO performance. An SEO writer must take the time to understand who your audience is, what is important to them, and what content would be useful and meaningful to them. Use long tail keywords that are very specific to your business to target a particular audience. These phrases epitomize the true essence of your business without coinciding with other related companies. They also provide you with a chance to score high on a search query most pertinent to your products or services. The problem with directories: A good directory’s intent is to categorize the internet into different categories/subcategories, while providing links to good websites in those categories. Although there are legitimate directory websites, many were built solely for the purpose of building links back to webpages without consideration of link quality. This is the wrong way to build links.

Set a bare minimum expectation for site structure

You hear a lot of hot air about content, why it’s important, why brands need to be producing it etc, but not a lot of context about measuring impact. A crawler is a Search Engine bot or a Search Engine spider that travels all around the web looking out for new pages ready to be indexed. In this scenario, the web can be considered as an entire country and the spiders/bots of Google stop at every destination to find the new places that have been developed in the country. Meaningful content that operates as part of a wider digital marketing strategy, with the likes of social media and blogging all playing a part, is now key. The length of search phrases continues to grow. Back when the Internet was just an upstart, single keywords were the only thing you needed.

Be inspired by the David vs.Goliath battle

Most SEO consultants have said goodbye to spammy, shady optimization techniques because Google actively penalized you for it since 2011. Properly optimizing your images can help you take advantage of using photos to generate empathy, increase trust, and improve a visitor’s experience without hampering load time which could affect your SEO ranking. As Google’s preferred configuration for mobile-optimized websites, responsive design is your best option for delivering a great search and browsing experience to mobile users. You should also be looking for niche relevant profile opportunities. Is there a prominent industry community that you can get a link from via a profile? If so, these usually go further than general opportunities that would make sense for really any website.

Local Link Building

Google has drawn conclusions about user-behavior in search, realizing that searches prefer to see a variety of media formats for a given search query. Writing for your customers is the key to success. Do your thorough keyword research and create articles and content that is optimized for SEO, and something your readers would love to read. Use keyword research tools to select an appropriate list of keywords that would work well for your content. Link building is also spreading brand awareness and capturing referral traffic. According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "The page title is still one of the most important ranking factors for Google, so you have to make sure it’s optimized correctly for every page. This means adding the relevant keyword to each particular page and making sure that your page title isn’t too long."

Get inside the heads of your customers

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. Not all links are equal. The Google determines the quality of the links by looking at the quality of traffic that the specific links are driving to your website. Ensuring that your piece of content explores the topic fully across many relevant sub-topics, and doesn’t only provide a thin/generic answer, will help with discovery and perceived value. One part of SEO many have heard of is keyword research. After all, every time we use a search engine, we’re using a keyword (the name is a misnomer, most keywords have more than one word in them!)