Choosing a keyword-friendly domain name is crucial to the success of your SEO campaign. Search engines will index a domain name that is also part of the page title and website description faster than a domain name that bears no relation to the title of the site or content on the site. Target local trade by including place names in your search terms and keywords. This is particularly important for small business website SEO. When it comes to local SEO, it’s more important than ever that you optimise your on-site and off-site SEO strategies for clients and customers who may be searching for your local business. Local competition is heating up, and if you’re not on top of your rankings, you can bet your competitors will be. Everyone is familiar with the expression “content is king.” Without rich content, you will find it difficult to achieve good rankings with specific keywords and to direct traffic to your website. Numerous studies have documented that page one rankings are often in the 2,000+ word length and higher.

Create Search Engine & User-Friendly Pages

In a nutshell, the combination of seamless user experience with quality content can have a very positive impact on your SEO rankings. Whenever a high authority blog links to your website, Google considers it as a positive signal toward your blog. Your blog becomes more important and it gives your site a boost in search rankings. The more backlinks you have, the higher you rank on Google Search. By correctly using header tags in the following order H1, H2, H3, H4 all the way to H6 (if necessary) when inputting copy, you’re helping crawlers navigate each page of your site easily and understand its content. Heading tags are also a great way to break up the copy on your page to make it more readable for your visitors. Create infographics around your industry, at least once every two weeks or even one per month. Infographics can be simple. They don’t have to be full of tons of data or tons of information, but they do have to be interesting and creative.

How long is my content alive?

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. Longer content tends to rank significantly higher on Google’s first page. Make sure all of your articles have 1000+ words of useful content. Longer content helps you rank better for your target keyword and brings in more long tail traffic. SEO isn’t an option for small businesses today. When a potential customer searches for your product or service and you’re competitors show up higher than your site then you might as well be invisible. Google has spent millions of dollars to create faster load times for search results. If they have taken load times so seriously, shouldn’t you?

If you can focus on having the best quality content and links you will beat your competition

Page load speed is also a ranking factor, especially for mobile. Links aren’t the only factor of importance; you also need to make sure your on-page SEO is up to scratch and that your keyword targeting is on-point. Search engine crawlers and indexing programs are basically software programs. These programs are extraordinarily powerful. They crawl hundreds of billions of web pages, analyze the content of all these pages, and analyze the way all these pages link to each other. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Besides looking for established companies and Internet presences to learn from, you can also pick up some good tips and quick information from up and coming companies that are suddenly doing well in the rankings."

Who Would Link to You?

The days of buying, selling, and trading links for rankings is long gone…and if you try to bring it back, you will be long gone as well. While search engine bots are scanning websites for indexing purposes, they also look for links to other websites. The more high-quality inbound links the website has, the greater its link authority. In theory, every inbound link counts as a positive recommendation for a website. However, it is not the quantity of inbound links that plays the biggest role for search engines; it’s quality. Make sure all the links are no follow if you are being paid by a third party to publish a post on your blog. The backlinks which are paid are punished by Google. It applies for both, the page giving it and the one receiving it. Make it easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text of your links. Your content becomes less useful if users miss the links or accidentally click them.