Your customers are online. If you let your limited budget keep you from being easily found online, you’ll lose out on business and customers. You may believe you can’t afford to do SEO, but the truth is you can’t afford to ignore SEO even more. In 2012 …

In general, though, focus on relevance above all else. It’s tempting to just shoot for the big, authoritative opportunities, but by doing so you run into a few issues. Aside from offering users the best insights possible, high-quality content goes hand in hand with your backlink profile--a key element …

High authority links are great, but in my opinion, relevant links win the game every time. Not all links are equal, as high-authority sites contribute more heavily in this regard. This means you should aim for more reputable mentions – but without snubbing any lesser sites that might link to you …

Keep your descriptions under 150 characters to avoid a trail off (…). This shows visitors that you have intentionally put up an informative and helpful description, opposed to the randomly generated one that Google pulls for non-optimised pages. Today, the secret to SEO is no secret at all. It's common sense …

If your website is trying to rank quickly for a specific topic, and yet there is not a piece of high-value content that addresses that topic, the probability of showing up in the Google search results is small. Google has several bots: Googlebot (desktop), Googlebot (mobile), Googlebot Video, Googlebot Images …

From an SEO perspective, I never treat a piece of content as ‘complete’. There is always room for improvement with updates, additional information, and various other things that can make it more useful to visitors. I think one of the great SEO myths is every site should have a blog …

The more relationships you have and the more people trust you, the more people will talk about you, link to you and, ultimately, buy from you. Customers don’t buy from people they like, they buy from those they trust! If you have several versions of your site in different …

Bear in mind that your keyword or phrase should be the most frequently used term in the body text of any given webpage. This is called keyword density. However you shouldn’t overuse this signal – if you stuff the copy with keywords then your text won’t be readable and …

Search engines often reward you for updating old content. But remember, you only get a reward for actually making the content more relevant! Seek out industry-relevant and locally-relevant links from groups and websites with which you already have an offline relationship. Having a few 404 errors will not ruin your …

You should track the traffic, engagement, conversion rates and page visits for your mobile strategy separately than those of your desktop strategy. 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 …

One question that often arises in regards to HTML tags and linking is whether or not internal links should be “nofollowed.” “Rel=’nofollow’” instructs Google to not allow PageRank to flow through the link. You don't want to just attract people to your site, you want them to take the …

The content on your blog or website is the digital salesperson in the organization, and should follow the same brand values and guidelines. Content marketing is the process of developing unique content that is useful for your target market – often without selling whatsoever. There is little doubt that good search …

You need to see things from your customers’ point of view and, more importantly, you need to write the things that appeal to their viewpoint. Gaining backlinks is tough, as it involves convincing a website to share your website with their audience. It’s a hustle to pitch your proposition …

Think of SEO as one small part of a much more cohesive marketing strategy. If you don’t want to spend any money on a keyword tool, you can simply google the keyword you want to rank for. Does your site ‘fit in’ with the results Google shows you? Or …

Competitor analysis is nothing new, and companies have been researching their competitor’s links for years. However, by looking at the competitor’s backlinks and manually reviewing which links are worth having, you can then perform a link outreach and try to get a link from the same referring site …

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 …

f someone is more actively seeking something then it’s more likely they’ll search longer strings of words, meaning that you will target people who will be more willing to engage with your content. If you’re selling goods or services, then targeting long tail keyword can really make …

Over-optimization is proof that there can sometimes be too much of a good thing. Improving your ranking for certain online keywords is ideal, but mutilating your content by stuffing keywords into everything you write, or building way too many links with the same anchor text will not only look unnatural …

Technical SEO can seem daunting. However, understanding the principles is important. There may be parts you can try, or work on with your developer. Whether it's your friends, relatives, employees, colleagues, business partners, clients, or anyone else, ask them for a link. Someone you know has a website or blog …

Having a few 404 errors will not ruin your rankings completely, but they can lower your user experience, which ultimately can affect your SEO performance. An SEO writer must take the time to understand who your audience is, what is important to them, and what content would be useful and …

Improving visibility and driving traffic are nice, but the most important goal is to achieve the goals of your organization. For most organizations, that means generating sales, leads, or advertising revenue. SEO is a long-term strategy for your business and when done correctly (with the proper amount of time and …

Basically a search engine searches the web using automated programs called web crawlers. The crawlers follow links from page to page, they then send a copy of each page back to the search engine, which then builds an index of the words on each page. Creating a guest post for …

Find out which pages on your competitor’s site are bringing in the most backlinks, social shares, and traffic. Seek out industry-relevant and locally-relevant links from groups and websites with which you already have an offline relationship. Anyone with a site that provides useful content and has the right network …

Link building, as a strategy, began in the late 1990s, coinciding with the advent of Google. In the early years of SEO, link building was at the forefront, and generally considered the most important tactic to get one’s website picked up by the search engine. The practice of link …

A site’s age has an influence on that site’s ranking. A site that has been around for a long time can be seen as more reputable. Plus, it gives Google a background in determining a site’s trustworthiness. Basically, site age lets Google know your site is legit …

80% of traffic to a website begins with a search query and 60% of clicks (to a site) are generated by the top 3 search results (on the search engine result page). Whenever a high authority blog links to your website, Google considers it as a positive signal toward your …

Many business owners create a website and find that they are receiving international inquiries about their services, or receiving orders from other countries. Although they expected their market would be local, or at best national. Human users are already intrigued by your title; all that’s left to do is …

The structure of your URL can affect both your page’s ranking, but also the user experience. How the pages on your site are organized and structured affects your search engine rankings. It also affects your it’s user experience (UX). Basically, you want to make it easy for actual …

Links at the top of a page carry more weight than those further down. Your bounce rate is determined by the amount of people that click on the link to your website in the search engine result pages (SERPs) and consequently click back again to Google. A high bounce rate …

In the coming times, content from social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will gain more importance on the SERPs A negative SEO strategy involves crawling a website. This “forceful” crawling of the website puts strain on the web server, causing the website to slow down or even crash …

Optimizing page titles for search is best done finding a balance between volume and intent. 99% of people don’t need any fancy tools or tactics. They just need to write the best content online for the topic they want to go after. The SEO of your website is largely …

Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site. Many users also prefer this over other approaches, especially on some devices that might not handle Flash or JavaScript. While doing a backlink …

Make sure your visitors know where to find what they need, and of course, make it simple for them to get back where they started. Find out who your customers are and what words they use to describe your product, because people will use the same terms to find your …

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 …

Link Building adds a level of credibility to your website which just isn’t present without those links to reliable information sources backing up whatever claims you’re making back on your own website. Everyone knows not to trust everything they read on the Internet, but finding other sites saying …

Remember, the reason that website isn't bringing in customers is because you have given them no reason to come back. The type of permalink you pick influences the way these two parties see and value your site. A URL with a load of incomprehensible gibberish at the end is a …

Make sure you have clean, short, descriptive URLs. Descriptive means keyword-rich but not keyword-stuffed. The online audience has evolved and expectations are high. They are mobile, they are time poor and they live in a world where sharing ideas and content on social networks is just a natural part of …

Use attractive subheaders: Readers should be able to bounce around to seek out the pieces of your content that interest them. By using attractive subheaders, you can pique the curiosity of your readers and keep them engaged. If you have a real business, the same advice applies. You should decide …

Nofollow does not mean that the search engine bot will not follow the link at all but, it only means that the search engine bot will not pass value / link juice which normally would have passed for the given link. A 301 redirect means that the move is permanent. If …

When you write headlines, it is not absolutely mandatory that you use keyphrases, but you get a decent bump in the search engines for putting them in headlines which are bolded with a larger font than the other text and capitalized. Although Google Plus might be one of the less …