The clear majority of websites gear their SEO strategy toward traditional search engine keyword searches carried out by typing. Every piece of content should have the user in mind. This also applies to SEO. You can’t create your next piece of content, or carry out keyword research, without knowing your audience. It’s clear that there is a link between the websites which rank highly for a certain keyword and whether or not that keyword appears in its URL. However, this is unlikely to be the only factor that determines whether or not a site can rank well. It’s also important to know what kinds of link-building strategies to avoid, so that you don’t waste your valuable time and effort doing something that can make Google sandbox your site (remove it from their search engine).

Follow a consistent content cadence

Search engine algorithms will surely crawl video content directly instead of just crawling the text based content surrounding the video. This will gradually phase out the effectiveness of using “clickbait” to draw more attention to the video. Keyword stuffing, hiding keywords in a very small font or a color that blends with the background, and paying for incoming links are all tactics that Google considers to be spam, and your website’s search traffic will be negatively affected if you’re caught doing any of them. Google doesn’t want to deliver you “results” anymore, they want to deliver answers. And the best answers don’t come from content farms, they come from websites that are crafted with their visitors -- human beings -- in mind. Community hijacking involves finding online communities that are made up of your target market, or people that can reach your target market so that you can build a relationship with them and get them to promote your content/brand/product(s).

You have an opportunity to write something and rank highly

Search engines aren't good at completing online forms (such as a login), and thus any content contained behind them may remain hidden. SEO-ing your web content is a great way to generate easy traffic. That being said, you won’t get traffic instantly by writing a few blog posts. If search users commonly misspell a keyword, you should identify and use it. On the internet, you can find hundreds of blogs, which are coming from self-proclaimed online marketers. What I find lacking in those blogs is they don’t take in stride the transition of content from the first-among-the-equal to being synonymous with SEO.

Structure your content to meet your SEO needs

Link building refers to building credibility on your website by having your links appear on other web pages. What SEO specialists and strategists should be doing, instead of link building, is establishing relationships with local influencers and businesses. You should see improvements in website traffic, a key indicator of progress for your keywords. Increasing your search visibility is a good thing, clearly, but it takes a lot of time and effort to accomplish those rising rankings, and there’s no guarantee how much extra traffic they’re going to send your way. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Make it clear on your own Web site that you want links - ask for them directly and make it easy for people to link by writing the linking code for them (using keyword phrases in linking text of course)."

Improve your visibility in organic search results

Consider what happens when a user removes part of your URL - Some users might navigate your site in odd ways, and you should anticipate this. Google now indexes content from Facebook, Twitter and presumably more social media platforms to come. If your timing and relevance is right, your post could directly show up in search results. Instead of writing on-page copy for the sole purpose of repeating a keyword multiple times, you should write about your product or service or idea naturally, and let your keyword variations naturally fall into place. If that doesn’t happen, go back and spring in some variations into the content so that the same message gets across, just optimized! A local business competitor might not be your online competitor — welcome to a bigger game of tug-of-war. As you work to improve your SEO, it’s your ongoing job to stay ahead of the competition and detect emerging rivals as they climb the ranks.