Search engines use the notion of citation index to evaluate the number and quality of inbound links to a site. Citation index is a numeric estimate of the popularity of a resource expressed as an absolute value representing page importance. Each search engine uses its own algorithms to estimate a page citation index. As a rule, these values are not published. The key is to consistently deliver value so that people come to your site for answers. And this is also ironically what will get other good sites to link to your site. This is the perfect example of ‘emergent SEO’. Links aren’t just for navigation; they are also a tool for guiding potential customers through the marketing funnel. It’s easy to assume that Google already understands the content and relevance of each and every page on your website, but the fact is that it needs a fair amount of hand-holding. Fortunately, helping Google along really isn’t very difficult at all.
How are you supposed to do it?
Focus on your customers, and take the right logistical steps to make sure that search engines can find your content. Focus on the ‘road less traveled’ with long-tail opportunities, and you’ll be set. Remember, it takes
20 years to build a reputation and only five minutes to ruin it. Make sure your backlinks appear to be natural. Don’t ask webmasters to link back to your pages with a specific anchor text since this can haphazardly result in a pattern that may get noticed by search engines and cause you to get a linking penalty. There is significant traffic to be gained by optimizing for video search engines and participating in them. Once again, these are binary files and the search engine cannot easily tell what is inside them
Leverage the power of social media and watch your rankings soar!
Good formatting can instantly improve your page’s readability. This, in turn, can improve your engagement rate. t’s not necessarily
bad to optimize for traffic, it depends on your goals; if you’re in e-commerce or a service based business it is more valuable to invest your resources in making sure you rank well for the terms that are most likely to lead to a sale; optimize for conversion, not just to gain the visitor. Optimizing for search engines and creating keyword-targeted content helps a site rank for key search terms, which typically leads to direct traffic and referring links as more and more people find, use, and enjoy what you’ve produced. Syndication takes the credibility of the site you’re syndicating it too and transfers all the link juice and credibility (as well as social proof) over to your website. Syndication is a great way as well to gain a lot more visibility for the same amount of work!
Add valuable insight to your creative content
The faster your site, the more Google will favor it. There’s a very useful tool from Google itself to check your site speed: Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool gives you an overview of what aspects need improvement to boost the speed of a particular page. As our internet ecosystem has evolved, we have shared increasing amounts of personal data with services we use every day, from social networks to search engines. They then use this data to tailor the content they provide us with to what they think will be most appealing, engaging or relevant. Stop marketing to audiences and instead market to customers at scale. We asked an
SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Bing has a partnership with Facebook that allows it to access data on user behavior on Facebook and use that to influence rankings and the presentation of its search results."
Monitor Google My Business
In establishing domain names, you may come across articles, which may suggest not to make use of hyphens on them. You should become aware though that using hyphens on your domain name is not a bad practice. However, you should know that most people these days, are not used to typing domain names on their browsers that come with hyphens. Whether you purchase
a separate domain (recommended) for your blog, or host it on a blogging service or a subdomain of your own site, try to ensure that your URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for. The safest way to ensure there are no duplicate content problems is to use a rel=canonical tag on the republished article. This will tell Google that the linked article is the original and therefore should be indexed, and any ranking benefits will be passed through. Unsurprisingly, larger companies tend to outspend smaller firms when it comes to SEO.