It's not actually that difficult to get on page 1 of Google in a search (but that depends on the search!) You need to know your market and you need to have a good understanding of SEO and how to use keywords. You also need some time, I'm not selling magic online marketing wands - if you know someone who is, please hook me up! Producing content for search engines is also content marketing, list building, and relationship marketing. If Google decides a site no longer adheres to its quality guidelines, they may apply a site-wide penalty pushing the results down for every page. The more infractions, and the greater the seriousness of the infractions, the bigger the penalty and the further the site will drop. Whether or not a specific page ranks for a particular keyword depends largely on the quality of that individual page (content, user experience, number and quality of the backlinks, page load speed etc), and not the quality of your website as a whole.
Brushing up the basics
Every SEO strategy focusing on making the best website possible, will make a website more usable and user-friendly. There are far
more unique search queries than
generic ones. If you added up the search engine
traffic of the most popular keywords, the number
would not even come close to the amount of
unique, niche keywords. This concept is known
as “long-tail theory”. 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. As Google continues its journey for the perfect user experience on their own site, you have to strive to keep up.
Understanding the rationale behind site structure
Google wants to see a healthy link profile that signifies authority. This means quality links coming from quality content across the web with a healthy diversity. Before you accept
posts from guest writers, double-check they haven’t been published elsewhere. Bloggers probably aren’t acting unscrupulously if they have been previously published, they may just not understand that this can cause search visibility problems. There are literally hundreds of factors that contribute to your final rankings. On top of that, it can be hard to determine what kinds of trends Google may associate with your chosen keywords. Keeping track of your backlinks is just as important as building them. That’s because SEO relies on the quality of the backlinks your website gets. The more high-quality links you have, the higher you will rank in Google.
Have direct links from your homepage to your most important pages
Another quick and easy strategy for hunting down long tail keywords again starts by searching one of your regular short, generic keywords. At the end of the search results page should be a list of related searches. These again can be used as long tail keywords themselves or used as suggestions for finding others. The amount of time and effort spent in pushing the content and links for a Website as close to the limit of what search engines allow in their guidelines is better spent creating unique, interesting, and helpful content. If the content were really that good to begin with there would be no desire to test the guidelines to find an advantage. A website’s quality, design, content, and usability are huge factors. The performance of a website from a technical and user-experience aspect is becoming a stronger component to achieving top results. Gaz Hall, a
Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "At its core, SEO is about user intent. Search engines, like Google, want to provide users with results that are relevant to their queries and offer the utmost value. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the best and most relevant pages are given higher positions on a search engine results page."
Adapting for the long tail of search
Just as Google has always been focused on providing its users with the best results, now it’s time to put your focus on what’s most important for your audience. Outliers are the
actual reason why we study average and median numbers separately. Quite a few pages rank for an enormous amount of keywords, which drives the “average” numbers up. SEO is something that is constantly evolving and changing. I think one of the great SEO myths is every site should have a blog. I have seen sites invest in filling passionless blogs with content to feed the SEO machine.