Ask your customers for reviews, mark them up with structured data and present them on a particular page on your site. This might do wonders. Online shops in particular often face the risk of generating duplicate content. For example, a product might be listed in several categories. If the URL is structured hierarchically, a product can be accessible under multiple URLs. One reliable way to solve this problem is by using a canonical tag. This shows Google which URL is the “original” one and which one is a copy. The Google bot then ignores the copies when crawling your website and only indexes the original URLs. While SEOs aren’t generally user experience experts, we do have a set of SEO techniques and tools that let us build a fantastic, user-targeted website. Specifically, we structure web content based on user demand. Would you rather read 5 articles about one subject, or one or two well thought articles with significant amounts of data or thought process to back them up?

Think of People, not Robots, When Optimizing Keywords

You can generally only use one H1 tag per page, but H2 and H3 tags can be used to break up your content further How do your competitors rank? Pick out a keyword for which you want to optimize your site. Check out the top 20 search results: Are your competitors somewhere in there? What is your ranking for this keyword? This information should help you to find a good niche for you and your keywords, where your competitors are not operating. It may also be that you find keywords for which it is worth joining the competition. Links need to actually be of interest to the reader. They must be relevant to the reader’s concerns and answer a question, provide advice, show images or do something else that is beneficial to the reader. This might sound tough, but it’s really not. When the damage is done, it can be very hard to get back onto Google’s good side. In fact, that's often impossible.

Quality content takes time and money

Understanding how your website visitors find you will help you determine if your SEO, marketing or networking efforts are paying off, or if you should refocus your priorities. SEO doesn’t have to be hard or require an expert team to get results. If you’ve got a process and a structure, you can rank your content in search engines quite quickly. With website analytics, you can hone in on your audience, identifying things like their interests, demographics, language, locations and behaviors. Understanding these elements can help you improve your website content. Google’s SEO Starter Guide states that, “If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would.” In other words, including keywords – or at least clear and direct information – in your URL is a best practice.

Closing the Loop

Don’t use hidden text or links on your website to optimize your site for search engines. Some webmasters will try to make text or links invisible to visitors but visible to search engine spiders. One way they do this is to use white text on a white background. Search engines can now easily spot this sort of behavior, so it will not help your site rank at all. All search engines deliver results based on relevancy and popularity, but how they determine what’s relevant is what differentiates them from each other. All search engines crawl and index the web, but each have their own algorithms (super complex systematical equations) for ordering the information. Search engines audiences are “in demand” mode and already tell you what they are looking for. This makes them a fantastic pre-qualified market to tap into. If you wish to drive revenue from new business and but find other lead generation tactics ineffective, this is a key platform to consider. According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "Make sure that your code is valid, in some instances bad code can lead to search engines not being able to properly read a page. Use the W3C validator to check your markup."

SEO long term best practice

SEO is simply the process of getting website traffic from “free” or “organic” search results in search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. All major search engines have primary search results that are ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. SEO helps maximize the number of visitors to a particular website or page by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. Faked and manipulated website content (even backlinks) can actually harm a website’s SEO. For this reason, creating newsworthy content that inspires viral sharing and natural linking is the best way to ensure valuable SEO-rich backlinks. Paying people to link to your site won’t pay off in the long run, and could seriously damage your search rankings. Backlinks are links from outside domains that point to pages on your domain; essentially linking back from their domain to yours. Make a list of the top 10 business directories and build an engaging, content-rich business profiles on each of them.