Your customers are online. If you let your limited budget keep you from being easily found online, you’ll lose out on business and customers. You may believe you can’t afford to do SEO, but the truth is you can’t afford to ignore SEO even more. In 2012, Google began to penalise any site found with bad backlinks and alongside this, it can ban your business from Google Adsense. This means that anyone with links gained unethically through black hat SEO tactics, for example, paid link building, overuse of affiliate links and duplicate content to get to the top of Google, now find themselves faced with a penalty. Google prefers sites that are easy to navigate. This means having solid navigation in your top menu and other places on your site (like your sidebar and footer). It also allows Google to easily find related pages on your site. Whether you migrate to HTTPS for SEO or security, it’s now evident that using HTTPS is quickly becoming a necessity for most websites.

Place Copyright Notices and Watermarks

There’s a good chance you have some fantastic resources your audience would love. If you don’t, get thinking. What can you build that would really interest your market? That others would share with their readers? Making use of the assets your business has will be a hook for getting attention – building links is much easier when you have content worth linking to. Stop using keywords in your titles. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a Web page without stuffing your title, then you don’t know how to optimize a Web page. Titles and URLs are options, not requirements, in search engine optimization. Learn to understand and fully appreciate the difference between being able to do something and needing to do something. A 301 redirect means that the move is permanent. If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, then you should use a server-side 301 redirect. Besides studying your web analytics data and using keyword research tools, there is another very simple research method: Use the search engine itself to do keyword research.

Find, target and shoot

Another factor in determining the value of a link is the way the link is implemented and where it is placed. For example, the text used in the link itself (i.e., the actual text that a user clicks on to go to your web page) is also a strong signal to the search engines. If you don’t know who your competition is, search for some of your most important keyword targets – sites that consistently rank well are the ones to take a look at. If you’ve been producing content in a haphazard manner, hoping and praying that some of it eventually ranks, it’s time to buckle down and commit to a more methodical SEO content strategy for the web. An effective link building strategy that simply makes a lot of sense is fixing broken links on your site and on sites that you’d like a link from. Your first step is to look for broken links on pages that interest you. After finding the links that go to pages that no longer exist, you reach out to the website owner and point out the link and suggest a new page that could provide value to their audience.

Brainstorming and Keyword Generating

To many users the personalization of search results is helpful and convenient, but an increasing number of users are disturbed by the extent to which the sites they encounter are being shaped by forces outside of their control. Analyzing content alone is not real SEO. Making a deliverable look pretty for a client is not SEO. 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. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "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."

What does great content mean for Google?

The truth is that working on the search optimisation for your website is not a guaranteed source of traffic. A picture can be worth a thousand words, they say. Well, when it comes to online marketing, a single image can be worth a thousand links! Use the rel=nofollow tag in the links to websites that you do not trust, you think maybe using spamming techniques or you do not want to help in the search engines. Knowing where to find good keywords and the proper way to work them into a website’s copy is important, but it’s only a small part of Search Engine Optimization process.