I think it's good to have lots of content on the website given the 'long tail' nature of searchers' keyword queries. Think of new ideas to expand your content, or even to invest in evergreen content, and make sure you think like a reader, rather than a search engine. Contrary to popular belief, linking out to relevant external websites does not directly impact your search rankings. Google is constantly evolving to better understand the context and intent of user behaviour.

Is Cross linking bad?

When it comes to getting your website ranked highly then keywords are still an essential part of Google’s ranking algorithm, they are the very backbone of search engine (even Yahoo) after all. But keywords aren’t what they might always appear to be. Although search engines can read text, they can’t read an image. That’s where “alt tags”, or “alternative text”, comes in. Links and more commonly known as backlinks to all SEO marketers are the soul of the Internet when it comes to forming a successful digital campaign. If there is a way for websites to interact with each other and gain benefits out of these transactions it is through backlinks and their version of monetary gain is earning link juice or website authority. Like the real world, the more juice or authority you have, the richer you get. As you spend time identifying your target audience and conducting keyword research, you’ll begin to uncover long tail keywords that will help you identify the best options for naming and describing your product or service.

How to Choose a Domain Name for Maximum SEO

Keyword research represents the very foundation of your SEO campaign and when done properly, keywords can drive traffic and rankings for your web pages. Keywords represent terms and phrases people type as search queries to find local businesses. Hopefully your website is laid out in a way that allows users to easily find the content or pages that you want to promote. Focus on building trust as opposed to trying to bend and break the rules. That way, you rise above Google's often-changing rules which are getting better and better at finding people who are looking for shortcuts. Look for pages that have excessive links. Google advises 100 per page as a maximum, although it is OK to increase that on more important and heavily linked-to pages.

Identify and remove duplicate content

Are you worried that your aesthetically appealing website is not getting you the right amount of traffic? Does it bother you that all the money you spent on developing a very creative website is going waste. Is your online business so vast that you are having trouble maintaining your site and the beautifully designed structures have all gone haywire as your business developed? It’s important to keep in mind that if search engine traffic is your only goal, your results will probably suffer. In order to please both the search engines (who will reward you with high rankings over time) and potential customers and return visitors, you need to offer value above and beyond search engine optimization. In other words, don’t produce “thin” content that ranks and get clicks, but doesn’t provide any additional value to the search engine user. Google will penalize spammy sites, and unfortunately this causes some bad behavior from bad actors. Say, for example, you wanted to take out a competitor. You could send a bunch of obviously spammy links to their site and get them penalized. This is called “negative SEO,” and is something that happens often in highly contested keywords. Google generally tries to pretend like it doesn’t happen. Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "A DoFollow link is a link which passes on “link juice” to the website it’s linking to, which is essentially a vote or point to the linking site. The alternative is a NoFollow link, which passes no link juice and does not help you rank."

Need to Branch Out

Really good SEO is a process and it requires a detailed and well thought out plan. You cannot expect to execute quality SEO without listing out what you’re going to do, documenting yourself along the way, and executing step by step. Review competitive lists and other pertinent industry sources. Blogging is one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to improve search rankings. Not only does a blog easily enable you to add fresh, relevant content to a site that might otherwise remain static, but it also keeps your web visitors coming back to your site for more. Although the role of keywords in SEO has changed greatly since the early days of search, with the evolution of long-tail keywords and natural language search, the humble keyword is still one of the fundamental building blocks of search optimization, and an important Google ranking signal.