Writing is hard enough when you have to write 500 word blog posts. Now imagine writing in-depth articles and guides that stretch to 5,000+ words on a consistent basis. Content marketing can be very effective in increasing traffic, generating leads, enabling sales – and contributing to SEO. Google uses your meta data to interpret what your website is about and ranks the pages accordingly. While it is important to have your keywords within the meta data, it can be overdone and hinder the user experience, actually deterring people away from a page rather than enticing. This happens when your meta title and description is written for Google’s search bots rather than as a description for real people. Reaching an international audience is an opportunity that is now available to small and medium businesses in a way that has never been possible historically.

What have you tried that doesn’t work?

Yes, "content is king" – but that's only half the story. Imagine if Wikipedia, one of the world's most popular sites, offered no more than huge blocks of text, or if Google cluttered its search interface with distracting graphics. It's unlikely that either site would have become as successful as they are today. When content and design work in harmony, users will find your site more easily and stay there longer. The best directories are the ones that also provide useful information for your potential customers. Integrate keywords, not only into the content itself, but also into the title, the meta description and even the canonical URL. RankBrain is Google's machine learning artificial intelligence system that's used to help provide the best search results for users. It auto updates itself and "learn's" from people's searches.

Offer useful information presented in an engaging format to human readers

A mobile strategy is not simply making minor changes to the desktop SEO strategy in hopes of making it compatible with mobile. If you are putting content on your own site, try to keep things fairly uniform. This can help you start building your own following and establish your own voice. Of course, that shouldn’t stop you from doing something that has more of a “shock factor.” Something a little more controversial can draw in big crowds, which translates to a lot of clicks and comments. What factors do you need to bear in mind? Does keyword usage still apply? Looking at a website’s backlink profile can tell you a lot about their marketing activities and help you to understand why, where, and how they rank.

A well-optimized Google My Business listing will form the cornerstone of your local SEO efforts

Technical SEO can seem daunting. However, understanding the principles is important. There may be parts you can try, or work on with your developer. Make sure that your website’s main menu only features the most important categories. By using internal linking strategically, you can boost the ranking of other pages on your website. Say you have a popular page that is ranking highly in Google and receiving a lot of traffic. By strategically placing a link on that page to another on your site that you want to rank, you can pass “authority” to that page. Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "To help your content attract as many social signals as possible, make sure you have sharing buttons for the major networks close to your content. People are lazy, and if they have to hunt for ways to share the content they may not bother."

Google updates have ensured that low-quality content is no longer enough to secure favorable rankings

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. The readability of your content has to do with the simplicity of its language, the lack of grammatical or syntactical errors, and the sentence structure. Online readability tests allow you to learn the “reading age” someone needs to understand your content. Optimization is the key to ensuring that search engines rank your website favorably in their results. But in order for optimization to work, the content on your site needs to be awesome! Now, this is an important issue to be addressed.