It is imperative that website owners and site developers engage in user testing. Without actually measuring what users are doing when they visit a site, one can’t possibly know how a website is performing. Setting up Google My Business is a must for your SEO gameplan. It is this that dictates whether your business will claim the space on the right hand side of the SERPs (the Knowledge Panel) when someone searches for your business by name. With SERP space at a premium, owning this piece of real estate when someone searches for your brand is a must. In the past, standard SEO advice was to get as many links as possible to your site, regardless of the source, and use the same anchor text each time. These days, doing that will get you knocked out of Google in no time. For those of you wondering, “index” is another name for the database used by a search engine. So “to index” a page is to have it added to that database. In other words, Google has discovered your page.

Pay Attention to Voice Search

At its core, SEO is about user intent. Search engines, like Google, want to provide users with results that are relevant to their queries and offer the utmost value. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the best and most relevant pages are given higher positions on a search engine results page. Your online presence goes way beyond your site. The problem is that we tend to forget how our online footprint may extend to all the different platforms we may try out at some point and then abandon. There aren’t many free, intuitive programs that give you the kind of super-valuable information that Google Analytics (GA) does. While your company may have a budget too small to implement a broad range of SEO services and strategies, investing in one or two things is a great start. It is certainly better than not investing at all in internet marketing.

Move From m. to Responsive Design

It will be hard to redirect your resources to mobile if your company has been completely entrenched in optimizing its desktop SEO. Like other internet marketing strategies, success won’t happen overnight. It takes persistent and consistent work over the long-term to see substantial results. SEO is the process of driving traffic from the ‘organic’, and ‘paid’ sources to win the rat race of ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs). Ensuring that your content is effective in connecting with the prospects searching for your products or services is crucial. Your web pages should be geared towards focusing on individual topics instead of individual keywords. I spent years and years focusing on doing nothing but building backlinks. The social hit and I had to change my focus. Now links are back as number #1 again, but honestly, did they ever really stop being the top factor?

Don;t forget to unblock search engines from crawling your site

Most webmasters believe Google crawls their website in one go and will continue until everything’s crawled. If anyone guarantees you page 1 ranking on Google within a three-month timespan, run for the hills. Make sure you are doing your best to have diversity in your Anchor Text when building backlinks. As far as ranking factors go, Anchor Text which had the search keyword in it tended to rank higher in Google for exact match searches and phrase match searches.​ Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "A web page can be given an immediate “freshness score” based on its date of publication, when then decays over time as the content gets older. Regular updates to the content can help to preserve that score"

The title tag gets a lot of weight in Google

Building backlinks is not enough. You also have to monitor every link your website is earning. Not knowing who links to you or when links are being removed can cost you a lot of traffic. Links help search engines connect the relevancy of a page with specific keywords -- based on the keywords that are used in a link’s anchor text. Head terms are searched more frequently, have less words (3 or less in most cases) and are often much more generic and competitive as a result. Long-tail terms are longer phrases (commonly over 3 words) and more specific. While long-tail keywords are usually less popular, we can usually tell exactly what the searcher is after. Relevance is part of your Quality Score, a formula that Google uses to measure how useful your ad, keyword, and website are to a customer.