To understand SEO, you need to understand search engines. A search engine is a piece of software that crawls the internet and indexes its pages in order to provide the best website recommendations based on a user's search query. And they use complex, ever-changing algorithms to do that. HTTPS secures …

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. Search engines simply want to deliver the most relevant …

It’s hard to imagine that just 10 years ago, SEO was a discipline governed by blackhat marketers whose sole objective was to increase rankings and drive traffic. Long story short—it wasn’t pretty, and Google didn’t like it. Trust an SEO expert who will build a campaign …

By creating great relevant content with the right keywords​ and having a few decent backlinks built to those content pages, you can easily rank in Google depending on the competition for that particular search. Competition with a comparable piece of content will beat you in the rankings if they have …

SEO today is increasingly driven by natural language search, that is, people doing searches that are more like normal questions than two or three keywords. When working on your content, you should take the next biggest thing into account: voice search. Yes, it’s been around for a while. But …

Successive Google algorithm updates have seen the nature of SEO change radically. Where once processes such as keyword stuffing – cramming words that are popular in Google searches into your website’s copy, whether they make sense or not – may have worked, now they can actually work against you. Don’t …

Website owners used to litter their content with tons of keywords in order to rank higher on Google. Now, the search engine penalizes for those practices. You have complete control over anchor text on your own website, and you should use it to your advantage. But you don’t really …

If a given site targets users in a particular location, webmasters can provide Google with information that will help determine how that site appears in its country-specific search results, and also improve Google search results for geographic queries. In Google search results, you only have space for 70 characters in …

Make sure you add responsive mobile URLs to your sitemap. Mobile friendly pages tend to rank higher for mobile search results, therefore inform the Search Engines which pages on your website is mobile friendly. Technical SEO is an often misunderstood discipline that many find difficult to pin down in exact …

Without discounting the value of links and traffic, content is most likely the key element of a website's charisma. Good content will lead to links and traffic. Seek out industry-relevant and locally-relevant links from groups and websites with which you already have an offline relationship. It makes sense to use …

If you want to use your SEO campaign to truly and accurately speak to your audience and potential buyers, think about what gaps you can fill that competitors don’t. Each year more than 2.8 trillion search queries are made on Google alone. This means that Google answers more …

When writing your articles, you need to keep in mind two things: first is your reader, next are the search engines. You need to make sure that both aspects are taken care of. Make it easy for your readers to understand and digest what you have to say. Since Google …

It takes time for Google to recognize your website and assign it the authority it deserves. It takes time for it to see that changes have been made, compare the quality of your website and your content to everyone else in the same space. Google’s shifts and tweaks on …

Producing low-quality content as fast as you can and sending it out en masse to as many article submission sites as possible has been looked down upon for some time. Google is trying to better understand the semantic meanings of words by looking at how they appear in knowledge bases …

All Javascript and CSS files on your site must be unblocked. That means Google must be able to access those files so that it can see the site as a normal visitor does. The search engines have an enormous task: that of indexing the world’s online content—well, more …

Optimization is important, but without metrics, you’ll never really know whether your efforts are paying off. But if you track and measure from the beginning, you can continually improve. Google itself recommends that large numbers of links are only generated by unique content with added value for users. In …

For experienced marketing teams, the content creation process has become a high-level assembly line. Keyword research must be updated periodically: Search terms fall out of disfavor as language changes, a company introduces new products and services, and so on. People don’t read on the web; they scan. To make …

Finding that people from an unexpected search term are converting more highly than those from other search terms? Then it might be time to switch gear and start trying to rank for that phrase instead! You can use off-page optimization to improve your website’s reputation and authority. This depends …

Unlike some aspects of the mysterious Quality Score “secret sauce,” we know that Google takes landing page relevance into account when calculating Quality Score Stop looking for quick wins and focus on building a trustworthy brand filled with incredible information. If you do that and you do just the smallest …

Content (marketing copy, etc) may be king when it comes to converting visitors, but for search engine rankings, link weight, domain authority and intelligent distribution of link weight appears to be much more effective, even when it means removing content. In order to improve rankings for long-tail keywords, make sure …

Be aware of long-tail keywords, which are usually three to four words in length. The longer the keyword, the more specific it is. That means lower competition and, often, higher conversion rates by nature. Getting your business included in local resource lists is an indicator to Google about your authority …

Keyword research is absolutely critical to help you understand where your content can earn both short- and long-term wins while making your content more competitive in search engines. Search engines often reward you for updating old content. But remember, you only get a reward for actually making the content more …