A website redesign presents the perfect opportunity for you to analyze your backlinks
and remove the shady ones. If you use Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll see a “manual
penalty” appear if Google detects one of these low-quality links. You’ll then have the
option to make such links “no follows” so Google stops paying attention to them. Google is looking for authoritative sites that are actual businesses that are getting legitimate visitors to their site. The greatest selling point of SEO is something that it shares with most of the broader world of inbound marketing: it allows for the possibility of cumulative growth. If your current website isn’t using HTTPS then you should start scoping out a migration.
On-page SEO principles
Guest posts can still be valuable from
a PR/community-building perspective,
but only if we approach those guest
blogging opportunities with the right
intentions. SEO closely aligns
with so many marketing channels, business decisions and user behaviour that the potential your website will be 100% optimised is slim, to nil. You might think that it is pointless to start learning SEO tips and tricks as the algorithms of search engines keep changing. That may be true to some extent but you’ll also notice that the points we will talk about below, have been there from the start and still play a vital role. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly and Page Speed tools to ensure your website converts the most mobile visitors possible, and make it easy to contact you from the top and bottom of every page.
Use dynamically generated page titles for database-driven websites
Title tags and meta descriptions are important elements of your website’s content. The title tag and the meta description tags should include keywords relevant to the content of the web page they describe. This helps Search Engines understand what the page is about and index your web pages accordingly for relevant keywords or keyword phrases. While building backlinks,
developing your social media presence, and other off-site practices are great for boosting your site’s rankings, on-page optimization is still incredibly important. Google allows webmasters to geographically target certain websites
or sections of your website to certain locations and regions via Google
Webmaster Tools. You can find these settings by logging into your Webmaster
Tools account, looking under Site Configuration, and changing your geographic
targeting in the Settings tab. Longer URLs tend to look a little more spammy within the search engine results page, and this is amplified if there are a lot of numbers and symbols within them.
Understanding the rationale behind search marketing
Search engines display page titles in their search results. In addition, search engines use page titles in order to recognize what information the website contains. The most recent ranking studies show that getting your website higher on the SERP involves more factors rooted upon relevancy than previously exposed. The pages which contain the most relevant content to each query are now appearing higher in the search results. Visiting a website and sticking in your credit card details in return for thousands of links remains an option but presents a greater risk than ever before.
Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "SEOs constantly work to get new links connecting to their sites that are from sources of high authority."
Making Sense of All This Keyword Data
The reason social is such a natural extension of search is that it adds both
relevancy and authority. Think about this: According to Nielsen research,
92% of consumers worldwide trust recommendations from friends and
family more than any form of advertising. This is up from 74% in 2007.
Before the Google
Penguin and Google Panda were let loose, SEO’s could manipulate a webpage’s rank more easily by adding lots of keywords to show Google that the page was relevant. This practice is what we now call keyword stuffing and is not just frowned upon by reputable SEO agencies, but is not tolerated by Google. Remember that keywords or phrases on each of your pages should total to around 3 to 5 percent of the total text of the pages. Your keywords should be spread out across multiple pages, not just focusing only on the homepage, as all of your pages carry an importance. Your page can have more entry points if it has more ranks. A general rule of thumb: If you have links in a menu at the top of the page, avoid duplicating those same links on the bottom of every page. Linking to the same page in the footer creates a hole for the link juice to seep out.