Make sure that your website’s main menu only features the most important categories. If you want people to link to you, make it easy for them. Create HTML ready snippets that people can plug right into their content to link to you, because some linkers in your community might not be too web savvy. I suggest either creating a "Link to Us" page or by using a little JavaScript to generate the HTML at the end of each article or post. During the life of any website pages come and go. It’s perfectly normal to remove a page, but what can frustrate visitors is finding their journey blocked by a dead page. Worse, a page that is removed loses any importance a search engine has given it. Sometimes called curation blogging, content curation means posting collections of useful links, videos, podcasts, infographics, and other resources on a specific theme, along with a little informed commentary.

Picking Profitable Local SEO Lead Generation Niches

Use the keywords your audience is searching for. Search engines understand synonyms and similar terminology, so using related keywords in multiple pieces of content helps the bots know what topics your site covers. That said, focusing on keywords for each piece of content you publish still matters. Duplicate content is your website’s worst enemy. Google is very serious about penalizing websites with duplicate content, descriptions or titles. An organic search strategy that involves a dedicated consumer focused approach is highly recommended. This entails total brand presence and not just keywords, understanding customer behavior, consumption preferences, needs and conversion paths. In the past, creating keyword rich anchor text used to be considered an effective strategy as long as they were on relevant sites. However, those days are long gone! Now, any keyword rich anchor text that you create on your own goes against Google’s guidelines.

Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks!

Creating infographics that give detailed information about your niche is another great way to build links. People using your infographics will be required to place a link to your site (where they obtained the infographic), thus giving you an easy backlink from a site relevant to your niche. Writing blog content is one of the best ways to generate traffic and inbound links to your site. Marketers who blog consistently see up to 97% more organic links generated for their site. Guest blogging greatly contributes to that number if you’ve made that part of your content marketing strategy. Your SEO strategy might include links to other websites or pages within your own website. Sometimes pages are no longer available and content is permanently removed from a website. When that happens, website visitors land on a 404 error page. Double-check the links on your website to ensure pages haven’t been taken down without your knowledge. The day may come when links are less important to rankings, but that day hasn’t arrived yet.

Look for bloggers with no end product

We all know that videos are a great way of keeping audience engaged and entertained. But do you know that by using enough videos, you can improve the ranking of your page on the SERPs. While the Meta keyword and Meta description tags aren’t used as a ranking factor, Meta tags do still continue to have a use when it comes to SEO. The Meta keywords tag can be ignored but the Meta description tag should be used to help entice users to click on your page. A good Meta tag should be under 160 characters in length and provide a synopsis of the content on the page. Think of your Meta tag as a short elevator pitch that you can use to drive people to your website. A URL is more important than you may think it is. Your website’s URL structure is like a math formula — when followed properly it will give you the right answer. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "If you don’t know who your competition is, search for some of your most important keyword targets – sites that consistently rank well are the ones to take a look at."

Rate of new link growth may signal freshness

Remember the good old days of SEO, when all that you really needed to have “valid SEO content” was a certain number of words crossed with a certain percentage targeted keywords and punctuated by a few words linking to targeted pages? Does the content add an enormous amount of value or is it thin and veiled in an attempt to merely rank for a keyword? Is the content unique? You can't skimp on quality. Not today. All business websites are different and there is never any ‘One Size Fits All’ solution to how you should be structuring your SEO campaign or the types of SEO services you should be employing. Take a look at which sites are currently winning the front page for the phrase you are hoping to win. Then, go ahead and link to a few of them within your own content. It can be within the body of the text, or you can include a few links at the bottom with a “More on This Subject” type of call to action (CTA). It may seem like this could lead eyes to a direct competitor, but don’t be afraid to break the mold and link to them anyway.