The prospect of Google penalties strikes fear into the hearts of most webmasters -- or at least the ones who don’t fully understand them. While you should not hide your heading tag in an image, you should still give search engines more opportunities to link to your website by adding keywords in the image alt text and file name. Local SEO is the process of optimising your online content and presence to make it easier for local consumers to find your business when searching for the services you offer. There's a lot of misinformation online when it comes to SEO. It seems that over the past few years, everyone has become an 'SEO expert'.

What should you look for?

Check the readability score of your content with the Flesch reading ease test, and aim to get above 60% Ranking in the search engines can be hard. Especially if the competition in your niche is high. As you probably know, you should start with doing your keyword research: getting inside the heads of your audience, knowing exactly what words they use and what they are searching for. But then what? Backlinks are links from outside domains that point to pages on your domain; essentially linking back from their domain to yours. On the internet, you can find hundreds of blogs, which are coming from self-proclaimed online marketers. What I find lacking in those blogs is they don’t take in stride the transition of content from the first-among-the-equal to being synonymous with SEO.

Link Out To Diverse Sources

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. It doesn’t take hundreds to see the needle move, especially with Google’s ever-improving ability to detect low quality and manipulative links. The functionality of your site should not surprise site visitors or interfere with a user’s ability to navigate. Internal links can help you prove your authority in a particular field by creating a logical sequence from one post to the other. This may lead to a series of posts that offer additional value, making it easier for search engines to understand your key topics.

Snappy results and SEO

If you don’t want to spend any money on a keyword tool, you can simply google the keyword you want to rank for. Does your site ‘fit in’ with the results Google shows you? Or are the sites on the results pages much larger or more well-established than your website? The most effective way to boost your website’s indexation is through linking. The paths that the spiders take through the Internet are formed by links. When one page links to another page, the spider follows that path. Within your own website, make sure that you’ve created links to and from all your most important pages. One of my firm beliefs is that Google is becoming more and more ‘human,’ and should be treated that way. This means that in all your SEO efforts, you should consider the use for us human visitors first, and then check if that aligns with any SEO recommendations. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "One of the first steps you take in a social media marketing campaign is claiming and filling out your social profiles with information about your company from your name and type of business to your address and phone number. This is indexable content and it can indirectly help your local rankings; many third-party review sites mine social media profiles for local business information, which they then compile into entries on their site. "

Relevance is the key issue for SEO

Create serious value by developing really well targeted 'content hubs,' or pieces of content that are highly engaging and serve a serious need that customers like yours need help with. Sitelinks are additional links which appear beneath the main URL for a brand or publisher when you search for it on Google. They deep link to other pages within your site, and are designed by Google to “help users navigate your site”. Google’s shifts and tweaks on ranking algorithms are happening more often. What you’ve learn from an SEO competitor analysis may no longer be true after a couple of months. Competitor analysis in SEO is great for getting valuable insights, but it won’t give you a remarkable boost unless you also provide unique value to your visitors. So keep an eye on your competitors, while constantly working on ways to improve UX on your site. There are two types of backlinks, and they are internal backlinks and external backlinks.