In an SEO scenario, Google likes to trust sites that have links from high quality, relevant sources. For example, large news websites don’t generally link to an untrusted source, nor do top quality industry blogs or university or .edu websites. To maintain a healthy website, do an overall audit of your underperforming blog content or articles to determine what to keep, what to make more robust, and what to remove. You don't necessarily need a large social media presence, just an active one. The more you engage with the local community by responding to comments and questions, the more your Facebook, Google+, Twitter and other social profiles are likely to appear in local searches. As brands across industries continue to see the impact that organic search can have on their growth, search engine optimization has come from humble beginnings to become a recognized strategic field of marketing.

Changing Your Perspective

You shouldn't feel comfortable using robots.txt to block sensitive or confidential material. One reason is that search engines could still reference the URLs you block (showing just the URL, no title or snippet) if there happen to be links to those URLs somewhere on the Internet (like referrer logs). Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (e.g. root page -> related topic listing -> specific topic)? Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages? Search engine algorithms will continue to become more sophisticated. Although SEO marketing tactics take a long time to show impact and ranking against high-power competitors isn’t an easy task, SEO should be a critical part of any small business’ long-term growth marketing plan.

Recycle existing content

Have you ever monitored the viewing pattern of people visiting your website? This is the pattern in which people view, in this case, websites. There’s been some debate in the SEO community about whether or not “social signals” can affect your search rankings, and what, exactly, “social signals” are in the first place. This is mostly because Google has both explicitly confirmed and explicitly denied the presence of social signals in its search ranking algorithm. The hypothesis is that articles that receive a high number of social media shares will get an additional boost in perceived authority -- which makes sense on paper, but the empirical evidence varies. Google has really focused its algorithm on providing relevant content in search. They want to improve the user experience y providing the most relevant search results for the query or question being asked. This means that while you can have great backlinks, you still need to also have great content. A negative SEO strategy involves crawling a website. This “forceful” crawling of the website puts strain on the web server, causing the website to slow down or even crash.

Tracking what works versus what doesn’t requires a least a few months’ worth of results

Your page title should be naturally descriptive and contain the right keywords. Most SEOs place this near the top in terms of ranking power. It's also important to ensure the title is catchy because this tag is what Google often shows in the search results. This means make it click-worthy! And the fact is all of your copy needs to be buttoned up. You need a lot of keywords that are worked in naturally without keyword stuffing. There’s strong evidence that click-through rates will influence your website’s Google search ranking, though this is difficult to confirm given the company’s secrecy surrounding their algorithms. 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. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "SEO metrics give you an indication of the overall competitiveness of a niche. When your competitors have a high DR score they are likely to have been around for a while and acquired a solid backlink profile."

Use Headers — Wisely

The number of referring individual domains linking to your website or webpage is a very important factor in Google’s algorithm. Technical SEO can seem daunting. However, understanding the principles is important. There may be parts you can try, or work on with your developer. Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs) based on its backlink profile. A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank. Authority scores are best viewed as comparative rather than absolute metrics. Web users want to see what the content (and therefore the title) is about without having to click on it. Allowing the readers to read the whole title in the search results will attract more qualified leads and customers to your site because they will know what they’re getting on the other side of the link rather than just quickly clicking to see what the rest of the title is about.