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 that uses a proven process, creates original branded content and monitors relevant metrics. Ranking in the search engines can be hard. Especially if the competition in your niche is high. As you probably know, you should start with doing your keyword research: getting inside the heads of your audience, knowing exactly what words they use and what they are searching for. But then what? One of the best tools available to help you measure the success of your SEO campaign is Google Analytics. This fantastic and free tool can be used to monitor how much traffic you’re getting to your website and where this traffic is coming from. You can easily identify pages that are working well for your business, as well as highlighting areas for potential improvement.

Check for broken links on your website

The direction that you take to improve the visibility of your site on the web should be decided upon by analysing the current state of your website, the audience you are targeting, your business objectives and any previous SEO work that has been carried out. User signals are behavioral patterns of users which Google uses to establish the rankings of your website in the search results. For instance: users click on a result in the search engines and after that, they immediately bounce back to Google. This is a signal that the website does not fit the search query of the user. The newest result isn’t always best – for less newsworthy topics, an in-depth and authoritative result that’s been around longer may outrank newer, thinner content. The backlinks you want pointing to your site are natural, authentic, industry-related and authoritative.

spend your money to support a cause close to your industry

Getting your content out there and shared generously should be your goal. Make sure the content is better than what already is ranking for your keywords; provide unique value and a fresh perspective on the topic. Consider your exposure options for your content, and get your content out to as many options as possible. Through links, engines can not only analyze the popularity websites and pages based on the number and popularity of pages linking to them, but also metrics like trust, spam, and authority. The absence of a hard and fast definition of content allows for cross-genre experiments. Infographics, explainer videos, vlogs are products of such experiments. Visual images entertain users whereas written content provide them with new information. Infographics, which is the cross between the two, do both. The same applies to explainer videos. Write about all those topics that are important to your audience. Use the words you came up with in your keyword research. You need to have content about the topics you want to rank for to start ranking in the search results.

Pay attention to Google’s official webmaster guidelines

We know that we need links because the value is there – direct and indirect – and every study or research piece published about SEO says that links are still important. Take time to write compelling Meta descriptions for all important pages of the site, and for any pages that can be shared socially. Content marketing has always been crucial but it is no longer enough to research several industry keywords, place them on your blog and rely on affiliate network to post links back to your site. Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "The ability for a piece of content to earn natural links that positively contribute to a website’s link graph is directly proportional to that contents value. In other words, the more valuable the piece of content is, the easier it will be to earn high-value links and increase Google traffic. Conversely, the less valuable a piece of content is, the harder it will be to earn links."

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In the end, the users, the marketplace, content and links will determine the popularity and ranking numbers. Google has given significant backing to its Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative too, and the evidence so far suggests it is paying off. As Google has become quicker in catching webmasters who use unethical SEO practices and has implemented harsher punishments for offenders (lower rankings or banning of websites, etc.). Some companies desperate for improved search rankings have found ways to hack into the websites of competitors and implement some nasty strategies on those sites. Keyword research can be time-consuming, but rewarding when done properly.