Finding that people from an unexpected search term are converting more highly than those from other search terms? Then it might be time to switch gear and start trying to rank for that phrase instead! You can use off-page optimization to improve your website’s reputation and authority. This depends mainly on inbound links. Off-page optimization involves measures which ensure that good-quality, relevant backlinks are created in the long term. This is also referred to as “link building.” Some of the first things you probably think of with regards to SEO are links. Links are good. We need lots of links to our site, and to our pages, to be successful. This is part of Authority, that sneaky third aspect of SEO. To add to your understanding of links, internal links (or links from your own website) are also incredibly important. They’re how we pass our website’s authority around. And those super nav links? They create links from every single page on the site, to every single other page on the site. Social signals may not play a direct role in ranking your site. But social shares generate more eyeballs on your content. And the more eyeballs you get, the more likely someone is to link to you.

Go great or go home

Each algorithm change brings the search engine closer to its intended purpose. It’s getting harder and harder to “game the system” with exploitive linkbuilding strategies and blackhat SEO. Most SEO consultants have said goodbye to spammy, shady optimization techniques because Google actively penalized you for it since 2011. At some stage you are going to have a large list of potential keywords. We need to find a way of picking the best ones to concentrate on. Within this we want a mix of head and long-tail terms. If you’re an existing business, you can learn a lot from your current customer base. If you have a shop you probably have a good idea of your target audience because you and your customer service team will be meeting and talking to them everyday. Otherwise, you could learn more about your customers by asking them to fill out a survey.

Canonical URLs in the Wild

Research proves the importance of gaining a presence on the first three pages returned by the search engines. Being on the first page of the search engine results page (SERPS) should always be the target. Information Snippets are the block of text found under the main title of a google search result. The use of information snippets are important when writing an article. The first thing that has to be considered, when planning your website content, is target audience. You have to think about who will want to visit your site, what they want to see, and why they want to visit. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking “My target audience is everyone.” Think about what happens when you type a query into a search engine. The results you get back are simply a series of page titles and descriptions.

Why Doesn’t SEO Always Work?

Keywords and link building are no longer as impactful as they once were; now, it’s all about creating valuable content. Google and other search engines are switching gears to focus on the relevance of the information you provide on your site. The “bots” that determine your site’s search engine ranking are crawling the web in search of sites that are conversational and have valuable content. (Not to creep you out, but Google’s system is critiquing your site like an extremely intelligent superhuman would.) Google is trying to better understand the semantic meanings of words by looking at how they appear in knowledge bases on the web, and understanding the properties associated with them from those knowledge bases, and also looking at the words that tend to co-occur on pages that rank highly for those words as query terms. Keywords should never be used to try to trick or mislead human beings or Google spiders.. This means using keywords that do not exactly describe the contents of your page, repeating a keyword over and over in a way that in not natural (known as “keyword stuffing”) or using any other black hat SEO tactics (like keywords in a white font on a white background) are all off limits. Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "If a search engine makes a page request that isn’t served within the bot’s time limit (or that produces a server timeout response), your pages may not make it into the index at all, and will almost certainly rank very poorly (as no indexable text content has been found)."

Improve site speed

A search engine results page (abbreviated to SERP) is the listing of results returned by a search engine in response to a query for a keyword or phrase. Search engines, like Google and Bing, will return many pages of content results for a given search term. Professional search marketers don’t sub­mit the URL to the major search engines, but it’s possible to do so. We know that we need links because the value is there – direct and indirect – and every study or research piece published about SEO says that links are still important. SEO helps businesses by allowing them to attract more customers to their website and if it's done right – attract them in a way that they also become customers. This is why I pair SEO with 'Conversion Rate Optimization' so that any site I'm doing SEO on also gets improvements in design and development that are intended to make it easy for people to become customers of your business.