There is still a correlation between high rankings and the amount of backlinks, but this trend will continue to decrease moving forwards. Keyword research is one of the highest return SEO activities that is essential for your marketing success. And for that, you need to correctly optimize the page. A …

If you want to achieve a higher ranking on Google and other search engines, you'll need to get serious about search engine optimization. Google is getting better every year at detecting spammer and low-quality links. Being proactive about taking a safe approach is the only way to avoid a penalty …

Making sure that your business is visible on local search providers like Yelp, Foursquare, Bing and Yellow Pages. If you want to sell products on your website and need to drive customers towards it, then SEO can help. When they are indexing websites, the search engines' bots scan every one …

If you want to optimize well for your city, state etc., make sure to sprinkle geographic search terms throughout. Include it in text as well as set apart. Search engines do not know where you are unless you tell them. A headline is usually the first thing we notice when …

It's one thing to optimize your site in its current state but another to keep it optimized as new content hits each and every week. Search engines don't like familiar or generic content. When it comes to growing your business online, there's nothing more powerful than organic traffic from search …

Trying to present a consistent theme across languages presents a great deal of difficulty: Language differences enhance the dilemma. Utilise Google 'My Business' (GMB) - Google has hugely increased the value of its Google My Business pages. Now, any information you add to your GMB will be reflected onto Google Search …

Google's featured snippets, also known as "position zero" on the SERP, can be a great opportunity to get one over your competitors in search results. Messages travel almostinstantaneously. You've seen what links you and your competitors have. Now it is time to start building up your profile. As with any …

Auditing an existing site is one of the most important tasks that SEO professionals encounter. SEO is still a relatively new field,and many of the limitations of search engine crawlers are nonintuitive. LSI keywords are synonyms that Google uses to determine a page's relevancy (and possibly quality). Sprinkle them …

If you're trying to build backlinks by pushing sponsored content, it has to explicitly say "Sponsored" on it. This is especially useful considering that an index page with content that changes constantly has a negative SEO effect. A search engine targeting strategy can mean several things. Some of the tools …

Some of these companies are setting up offices in Silicon Valley and beginning to add users around the world. Keyword stuffing is a strategy that shouldn't be used by any modern business looking to improve their search ranking. Sitemaps serve two purposes. Some e-commerce systems will create different urls for …

If you happen to come across a page on the web that has the label SEO or Search Engine Optimization) Made Easy, then you might do a double take. Such a website is making its own claim that it is part of the top results pages of the successful search …

Many products become top of mind or top choice due to brand equity. To be sure, stealing and republishing someone else's content without their permission is a terrible practice, and doing this frequently is an obvious sign of a spammy, low-quality website. The first sentence on the page is called …

It includes an understanding of the product's benefits. Search engines do not like thin copy nor do they value duplicate copy. Depending on my mood, I'll answer with something like, "Be interesting" or "Get faster." One cannot simply unsheath magical daggers to slay search engine dragons. The amount of time …

Google reshaped its search algorithm to deal with the billion of pages and searches made every day, with backlinks in mind. Organizations have spent millions of dollars selecting, meshing, and promoting brand names and logos. The higher the metric, the higher the ranking power. Include the right rich snippets, don't …

Google Webmaster Tools is the all-in-one interface for managing your crawl, monitoring your search rankings, and checking your backlinks. Google continues to enhance this now invaluable toolset. By doing so, you can optimize your homepage and then drive users to view your Flash demo. 301: Old promotions, out-of-date content, and …

Choosing an agency begins with the development of quality selection criteria. In the vast sea of websites--from e-commerce, media and informational websites to blogs and wikis--most site owners use a basic approach to search engine optimization. They submit their site to more than 200 search engines and blast these with …

Purchase and visit histories do not provide complete information. What about paid rankings? An HTML sitemap (as opposed to an XML sitemap) is often mentioned as being useful for SEO. They certainly are if you use them wisely (and especially Bing seems to like them at times), but I like …

That takes time. Check the hosting and registration information of any website by doing a Whois lookup. Some web directories require yearly or one-time listing fees. It is imperative that website owners and site developers engage in user testing. Without actually measuring what users are doing when they visit a …

People visiting your website are likely coming from all over the world and have different levels of understanding and points of reference regarding your topic. When writing, solve for as many angles and viewpoints as possible. Provide rich details, images and image captions. Add titles for each topical section so …

Your target audience needs to understand the topic and be able to put it into practice. Adding your site to any web directory just to get a backlink will have a negative effect on your website's ranking. Through keyword stuffing, brands fill or "stuff" a webpage with the same word …

It's fairly straightforward to find local Meetups, seminars, and conferences covering the SEO topic areas you will want to start following such as site speed optimization, content marketing, or user experience design. Influencer marketing involves an individual marketing a brand through social media. Search engines are now able to "read …

If you want your website to rank well and stay penalty-free, building new links is not enough. You need to take care of your backlink profile and disavow all the spammy links. Once you have chosen an umbrella topic (e.g. writing online content), narrow it down to a more …

Based on context, they begin to assign keywords to pages. If you have the content or product that people want to see, it is only natural to attract inbound links. To optimize your search engine results it is important to make your URL easily identifiable. Include words that are relevant …

Google's Search Console offers a series of useful services for web developers and site owners to help manage search engine results, optimise websites and identify any issues. At its core, Search Console is a simple method for alerting Google to your website and any changes that have happened. More and …

Don't get hyper-focused on particular short-form keyword searches unless you're convinced by overwhelming data that it is generating revenue. It's a fact that longer load times mean higher bounce rates and a significantly worse user experience. Many studies conclusively show that longer loading times can lead to significantly lower sales …

In cases where an eCommerce website is selling its own products, webmasters and marketers will need to decide whether to rewrite the 3rd party shopping feed description or the on-site description. One of my firm beliefs is that Google is becoming more and more 'human,' and should be treated that …

Local SEO is making sure your business address is regularly seen on the website. There is nothing as sad as people who spend days and weeks writing about something and then... nothing. All that passion and knowledge for nothing. Good, and yet unnoticed articles are something that happens every day …

Engagement can be built by offering incentives andreasons for the consumer to interact with a company. Numerous tools are available that allow you to keep tabs on your website, traffic sources, and user engagement. Optimizing for user intent is not just about providing solutions or using synonyms. The majority of …

To understand this, we need to pay a thorough look on these concepts. Think about the questions your visitors have that drove them to your site in the first place. A tool that is useful for keeping track of your character count is Nightbird. This application directly corresponds with services …

We should expect to see search within social start to matter more and more. Directories categorize your blog based on its content. You can get extra traffic from these directories since your blog can be found in many relevant sub categories. They also provide links to your blog (some of …

Duplicate pages can also reduce the search rank benefit of backlinks because it's better to have backlinks to a single URL compared to backlinks spread over a set of duplicate page URLs. If your site saw a significant drop in rankings after you made updates (that involve cutting out and …

A common example of this is a reseller or affiliate site who may use their suppliers product descriptions, or a recruitment site that may be advertising on behalf of a client (and the client is also advertising the job specification on their site) - chances are, the original site will have …