SEO criteria frequently changes and becomes more difficult, so many website owners (and so-called SEO professionals) fall out of their practice claiming that SEO is dead. There’s no need to obsess over SEO throughout the whole content creation process, but getting into the SEO mindset can offer useful insights into how to make your content more effective from now on. If you haven’t done it before, this is the year to get a professional SEO service on board. Local SEO can be particularly difficult to get right. Search engines won't notice changes to your site instantaneously. Google and Bing offer search tools to help you manage your site's search presence.
Lessons Learned from Crummy SEO
Google does not expect you to meet all of their standards, but they do expect you to at least try your very best. The days of blackhat and grey hat SEO strategies are over. Google will penalize
spammy sites, and unfortunately this causes some bad behavior from bad actors. Say, for example, you wanted to take out a competitor. You could send a bunch of obviously spammy links to their site and get them penalized. This is called “negative SEO,” and is something that happens often in highly contested keywords. Google generally tries to pretend like it doesn’t happen. Prioritize keywords and phrases, plurals, singulars and misspellings. Don’t get fooled by those agencies that offer 100% guarantee to get your website amongst the top results in a short time. The only one who can do this are Search Engines (which you can’t fool) themselves.
Simply put, people don’t know what they don’t know
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! Each webpage should
have a single focus
keyword and be included 1-3 times naturally in the page
content. Make sure it’s also included in your page title, meta
description, and H1 text assuming it fits within the parameters.
If it doesn’t fit well, work towards a more general keyword. To a search engine, relevance means more than finding a page with the right words. Producing content for search engines is also content marketing, list building, and relationship marketing.
Blog Commenting Is More Powerful Than You Think
Your headline is among the first things that users will come across when carrying out a search. This makes them important, and it’s useful to brainstorm as many variations as you can until you land on the best candidate. Solving real customer problems is a major key to mastering evergreen content marketing. Search engines also take into account the traffic generated by links from social
networks. It is assumed that these so-called “social signals” can influence a website’s
ranking at least when search queries relate to something current. We asked an
SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Canonicalizing a page is a way of telling Google that this URL is the “master version” you’d like to display in search results. This is helpful in duplicate content situations because Google certainly picks up on them. "
Authority flows through the links on your website as well
Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user
comments, but those that don't can most likely be manually edited to
do this. The SERP landscape
is constantly changing, with Local listing and OneBoxes popping up everywhere. Ranking number one has obviously never been a walk in the park. But now we’re dealing with a much more complex environment. Search engines don’t like familiar or generic content. Research proves the importance of gaining a presence on the first three pages returned by the search engines. Being on the first page of the search engine results page (SERPS) should always be the target.