Google will send people looking for information on a topic to the highest quality, relevant pages it has in its database. Your website must be easy for visitors to use if you want them to stick around at all. That doesn’t mean there can’t be compelling and maybe even controversial content, only that it must be easy to find and access for the visitor who wants to see it. Because people have shorter attention spans, keep the most important information in heading tags so they can scan and see if they want to delve deeper into the post. From a quality page point of view, duplicate content is a low-quality indicator. Boilerplate text is another low-quality indicator.
Quality over Quantity
In order to write the best article about a specific subject, do your research and check what articles are already ranking high in Google, for your keywords. 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 them even more for the fact that users like them a lot. Over the past few years the way we use search engines have changed. We no longer just type words into search engines, we can speak to our phones and search by asking questions, or we can use smart assistants on devices such as Google Home to answer queries for us. You should definitely be using canonical URLs with keywords and a relevant directory structure that also includes keywords. You should also avoid using too many page variables after the URL.
The Role of Anchor Text
Audit links back to your website and make sure they’re primarily from trustworthy, reputable websites. Once you are
done with cleaning up all the toxic backlinks pointing to your site, you need to file a reconsideration request with Google. This has to be polite and detailed, stating that you admit the mistakes you have committed, explaining the steps that you took to correct the same and promising to use nothing, but best practices for link building and SEO. Target 500 to 1,000 words per post without sounding spammy or repetitive. Trust me — 500 words is not difficult when you know your business inside and out. I am already at 1,500 words for this post (unless my editor breaks out a Ginsu knife). Also, publish frequently. Try one post per week until you get the hang of writing and blogging. Then bump that up to twice per week. Yes, contextual link building is important, because they boost results on search engines. But, the number of links on a particular content page also matters to Google.
Recycle existing content
Your website should be designed with your visitor in mind. Nobody wants to wait a long time for a page to load, and slow site speeds will tempt visitors to visit a competitor’s page. A site can never have enough content. There is always an opportunity to create new pieces of content, and the newness – or ‘freshness’ – of content is also one of Google’s ranking signals. Many SEO experts agree that a website's inbound links will be crucial this year, with many contending that there importance will increase as search engine algorithms increase their attention on penalizing poor links. According to
SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "CPA can vary greatly depending on your investment in local SEO, but is relatively low considering the low cost of local SEO. ROI can also be very high, since local SEO targets only consumers who need your services, which means you won’t waste money exposing your business to disinterested consumers."
Anatomy of a Keyword
RankBrain analyzes keywords against searches to let Google know what type of end results a web user is looking for. Google can then use that data to rank the relevancy of webpages concerning those keywords. Most SEO consultants
have said goodbye to spammy, shady optimization techniques because Google actively penalized you for it since 2011. An authority website is a site that is trusted. It’s trusted by its users, trusted by industry experts, trusted by other websites and trusted by search engines. On regular pages and posts, Google will most probably grab a piece of related content, including the keyword used in the search query. That makes a lot of sense for news sites, for example. Still, I recommend adding a meta description to all your important pages.