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 relevant! Google Webmaster is useful if you want to know how many back links you have and who from, it allows you to view links to your site from other sites, and shows you which pages of your site are linked to the most. If your web developer tells you that the website is accessible from a mobile device, don’t just trust him/her. Go over your mobile website yourself and check if you, as a visitor, can do all you want and need to do there.

Content marketing serves more than one very useful purpose

Buying backlinks can and does work, however, there’s a substantial risk involved if you buy low quality ones and/or from people who openly sell them. If their website gets penalised, you’re in trouble too. Your website’s health will not only impact your SEO results but will also have a hand in how well you’re able to convert your traffic. The driver of any heavy-duty link campaign is the quality and volume of your content. If your content is of average quality and covers the same information dozens of other sites have covered, it will not attract many links Link signals tend to decay over time. Sites that were once popular often go stale, and eventually fail to earn new links.

Take some action to bolster your SEO efforts

Much of the time, it makes sense for the search engines to deliver results from older sources that have stood the test of time. However, sometimes the response should be from newer sources of information Make a list of the top 10 business directories and build an engaging, content-rich business profiles on each of them. Keywords and link building are no longer as impactful as they once were; now, it’s all about creating valuable content. Google and other search engines are switching gears to focus on the relevance of the information you provide on your site. The “bots” that determine your site’s search engine ranking are crawling the web in search of sites that are conversational and have valuable content. (Not to creep you out, but Google’s system is critiquing your site like an extremely intelligent superhuman would.) Content marketing is really a component of SEO, and SEO is a component of content marketing – it's really a chicken and the egg situation.

Optimizing your website for both Google and web users

Do the main pages of the site have enough content? Do these pages all make use of header tags? A subtler variation of this is making sure the number of pages on the site with little content is not too high compared to the total number of pages on the site. To truly understand whether your SEO campaign is working, you need to learn which measurements deserve your attention. 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. Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "You’ve got to understand that authority, niche-specific and generic blogs that publish related content can do the same."

Are Keywords – and Keyword Research – Dead?

If you want to achieve a higher ranking on Google and other search engines, you’ll need to get serious about search engine optimization. SEO works by modifying elements on a website like the meta title and meta description of a page to ‘optimize’ it to get the most possible traffic. ‘Keyword targeting’ can determine which words you should be aiming for, and getting links from other high authority sites and creating relevant content on your web page and via articles on your site can shift your website up in search rankings over time. Links from a diverse range of websites is good, many links from a single domain to your site (especially if it’s one of the very sites linking to you) can be seen as spammy. When we’re creating content, if we don’t understand what the purpose is, then that’s when we really get confused about what is good and what is just good enough.