External optimization involves optimizing your content not only for search engines, but for tons of other referral sources, too. Republishing, repurposing, and distributing your content all fall within external optimization. SEO doesn’t have to be especially difficult, but it does need to be well-planned and given plenty of attention if you want to achieve stable website rankings. As of now, less than 50 percent of websites use local schema markup for local SEO, so there's tremendous advantage to be enjoyed by adopting it. Meaningful content that operates as part of a wider digital marketing strategy, with the likes of social media and blogging all playing a part, is now key.

Use Visual Storytelling for Effective SEO

Long form content is most valuable when it can serve as an extensive resource for readers on a specific topic. This includes long lists of tips, step-by-step guides, and collections of facts and statistics. Businesses that stick to the old SEO trick of “stuff a post with keywords and use metadata” will get left behind. SEO isn’t about tricking Google or working with spiders – it’s about creating content that wants to get read by your customers. Efficient content organization seeks to reduce, minimize, or eliminate unnecessary on-page elements without compromising the creator’s free expression. SEO must support the style of the content creator, not dictate it. Meta tags are the HTML elements that search engines and visitors find your content. It’s what they can see in a search engine and thus, it’s important to add value in a limited number of characters.

How should I take care of this?

Try to vary the lengths of your posts a little. This again looks more natural and suggests to Google that you’re not following a strict ‘formula’ of any kind! Fundamentally, SEO is a marketing discipline, not a technical one meaning that an understanding of basic marketing principles is essential. Nothing is more important to a successful marketing strategy than a strong understanding of the audience you are looking to attract. It’s no coincidence that the highest-volume keywords also tend to have the highest amount of competition, and of course, the higher the competition, the harder it’s going to be to rank for that keyword. Do you sponsor any events? Ensure you get a link from their website to yours as part of the deal.

Experience-based competitive audits

What we need to understand is that search engine optimization begins with the simplest of foundations: Create a Website that is easy to crawl, index, and match to queries people use. From that foundation we build greater complexity into our optimization methods and practices. Prioritise content marketing. That's publishing valuable content on your website. These can be articles, blogs, white papers, videos, infographics or other interesting information that can be shared with your network via an e-newsletter or social media. Doing this will create backlinks naturally. When dealing with search engines, the term ‘relevance‘ describes the extent to which the content of a website corresponds to the search term used. According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "The main heading of your page tells visitors, including search engines, what the page is about. Heading tags let us mark up what is a heading or sub-heading on the page, and we can use the h1 tag to show the primary header. Most CMSs do this automatically."

Add valuable insight

Spend some time to get to know the people who consistently share your content. Pull together a list of contacts with more than a thousand followers and a history of engagement in your content. Knowing your social media influencers will help you expand your reach online and ultimately increase the rate at which your content gets found online. Never start writing an article without performing a keyword research. The best tool to use is the free Google Keyword Tool. The problem is, not all backlinks are the same. A large and authoritative site in your niche may be more powerful than many general blogs with little or spammy backlinks. It’s important not to waste your time creating content for sites that won’t help you rank, but how do you determine if a site is worth getting a link from? Write proper page titles. Not overly optimized titles targeting a gazillion keywords. No. Proper, one sentence titles that contain your brand name and your focus keyword.