Less than 10% of the users in the most active internet countries have broadband. The faster your website loads, the better rank your site will have on Google and other major search engines. Local hosting will also typically help reduce page load speeds, so this is another benefit of setting up local servers. Compelling and unique images have always been at the forefront of link building strategies. Search engines, website owners, and their audiences find these types of assets helpful to the overall online experience. When the damage is done, it can be very hard to get back onto Google’s good side. In fact, that's often impossible. SEO isn’t something you learn overnight. If you want to perform your own SEO, you need to educate yourself. I’ve spent almost fifteen years learning about SEO and I’m thankful I did because I feel each hour of learning has paid itself back over and over again.

The role of SEO

If your already-designed website is not mobile friendly, it may be quite costly to make the site responsive. Responsive is the term for a website’s ability to adapt visually and operationally to a variety of dimensions and properly display on various handheld devices. One of the first things you ’re going to need to do is to fill your site with great content and to use your keywords throughout. There’s a fine line to be walked here: you need to repeat the phrase a few times to ensure that you create that association but at the same time, you also need to make sure that you don’t overdo it and thereby appear to be spamming. Natural, relevant links to your site from reputable websites is what takes you to the top of Google. There are many ways to go about getting your site linked. Social signals may not play a direct role in ranking your site. But social shares generate more eyeballs on your content. And the more eyeballs you get, the more likely someone is to link to you.

The Role of Anchor Text

It seems like content should be engineered for an outcome. If you just start with an article and then ask yourself how to get traction to this everywhere, that doesn’t always work. Content marketing is a highly viable digital marketing strategy, designed to attract and drive traffic to your website or specific landing pages Links aren’t just for navigation; they are also a tool for guiding potential customers through the marketing funnel. People either go to Google to find something quickly, or they go there to find something they can trust. For speed, they’ll be happy with paid ads. For confidence in quality, they’ll opt for organic search results. Pretty simple, right?

Link, link and link some more

You don’t merely want people to see your website. You want them to visit it, spend time on it and take the desired actions on it. If a blog or web site doesn’t use the NoFollow tag, the search engines acknowledge the link; if a site does use the NoFollow tag, the search engines do not acknowledge the link. The images that you upload to a webpage also have an impact on SEO. It’s important that your files have relevant titles, relevant Alternative Text and aren’t so big that they slow down the site. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "A Google research recently revealed that four out of five users trust search engines for local searches"

See what keywords your site is visible for

Think of yourself as an asset portfolio manager, because that’s what you are. In the same way fund managers need to analyze company financial data and operational performance before making investment decisions, you need to analyze your SEO competitors to inform your investment decisions. A silly issue that causes huge problems -- and happens more often than you would think -- is that sometimes people forget to unblock robots from crawling and indexing the website after the website goes live. Essentially, the higher CTR you have, and the more user experience your site receives, the higher the Google rankings. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ryte and HubSpot enable you to examine many important details about your website and its usage. For example, the HubSpot tool can identify which organic keywords are already driving traffic to your website. The same is true of Google Search Console, which is free. These keywords create a good base of core keywords and give you a list of keywords that you can use to measure the performance of your future SEO efforts.