Competitor analysis is nothing new, and companies have been researching their competitor’s links for years. However, by looking at the competitor’s backlinks and manually reviewing which links are worth having, you can then perform a link outreach and try to get a link from the same referring site. By sharing content that you post on social media as well as sharing your website content people are showing that your website is a valuable resource that they are happy to tell their friends about. Another effect of this is that people are more likely to link to your content and website if they have been introduced to it on social media. If your website code is not search engine friendly, then the search engines cannot read your valuable content targeting specific keywords. If you do not have worthy content that contributes to the wealth of knowledge that is the Internet, then you probably are not going to earn backlinks or social share activity. Backlinks and social media activity act as votes of confidence from external sources praising your content. They heavily influence a web page’s ability to rank for a target keyword. If you're not adding value, then the customer simply won't ascend and you won't grow your business (fast or slow). That's what it takes.

Link to internal pages on your site

It shouldn’t be surprising that the first step is identifying those high-value search terms that your potential customers might be using. You can do that through keyword research, which can be conducted a number of different ways. 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. Google has a free tool that allows you to test the mobile-friendliness of your website. As hinted at earlier, companies need to create a responsive website instead of creating desktop websites and expecting them to work on mobile. Focus on building trust as opposed to trying to bend and break the rules. That way, you rise above Google's often-changing rules which are getting better and better at finding people who are looking for shortcuts.

User-friendly Content — Because it Matters

Google can, and does, ignore low relevance links. The worst offenders are generic links (“click here”) and even worse, off-topic links. If your content fails to provide your users with any added value or to engross them, it will not help to acquire leads and/or customers. It is impossible to predict how people will search for content and which keywords they will use to do so. So, it is advisable to create content that can fully satisfy the users’ needs. It is not just about the quantity (huge amounts of text); it’s more about the relevance of the content to potential searches. Search-based competitive audits uncover the competitive landscape within the search results for a defined set of high-value topics. A key lesson to apply to pretty much every aspect of SEO, is not to get carried away when you find ideas that work. For example, just because quality is key, that doesn’t mean that you need to disavow every low quality link and only ever build links from the top sites.

Proofread The Content Before You Go Live

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. Today, many sites use secondary menus to accommodate for additional content. Loads of site-owners can’t help but state that they “can’t squeeze all they have to say in just a few pages.” SEO basically works by predicting and guessing how the Google algorithm works (because no one can be completely sure) and then using that information in order to engineer your website to get the maximum number of hits. It means gaming the system and this in turn can allow you to‘trick’ Google into believing that your site should be number one. Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "Make sure you pick a permalink structure that fits your goals. If you have a news site, it might make sense to add the publication date of the article to the URL."

Getting More Value Out of Your SEO Campaigns

Once you create your blog, stick to the same domain for as long as you continue to publish. You could end up losing a lot of your organic traffic, your readers and all your search engine listings if you decide to move or change your domain and URLs. The visual structure of your website is, in most cases, presented by the menu of your website. Of course, breadcrumbs and permalinks help a lot here as well, but these are not the things an ordinary visitor will take into account. The menu is. Originally devised as a way to combat comment spam, when a nofollow attribute is added to a link it tells search engines that your link to it isn't necessarily a vote of confidence. The cleaner the code on your website, the faster your pages will load and the actual html text on the page will be given greater emphasis. In other words, if you say “vacation rentals” five times in 100 lines of code, those phrases will stand out much more than if you use 10,000 lines of code. As you use more programming code, you dilute the value of the actual verbiage on the page.