As you gather intel on your website’s audience, the competition and commonly used keywords, it’s up to you to make informed decisions to determine which SEO strategies make sense for your business. Staying relevant is crucial to ensuring your website visitors are happy with what they find on your site — but don’t let staying relevant keep you from taking keyword risks and trying something the competition isn’t doing. Google is getting better and better at recognizing content that truly is useful to people. If you’re not blessed with excellent writing skills, outsource this job to somebody who is. With 75 percent of companies currently increasing their content marketing budget, it’s apparent that content can no longer be treated as a part-time job. Outsourcing content creation to dedicated writers allows for consistent, high quality publishing, fresh perspectives, insight into best practices and better leveraging of resources. SEO helps to ensure that search engines can locate, index, and serve your website’s content to visitors in an efficient manner.

Go ahead and call to action

Bear in mind that your keyword or phrase should be the most frequently used term in the body text of any given webpage. This is called keyword density. However you shouldn’t overuse this signal – if you stuff the copy with keywords then your text won’t be readable and Google will likely penalise you for not writing for human readers. If you’re an SEO-newbie you’ll probably hear lots of new and complicated terms. You should include a sitemap on your website that holds an index of all your web pages. This way search engines can find all of your pages and index them easily. You should try to limit sitemaps to 50 links, so make sure the most important ones are in there. Some search engines reject sites with more than this number. You can find freeware to do this for you, or alternatively some of our web hosting packages include software to do this for you. Picking the right keywords to optimize for is very important. Usually, it’s a good idea to pick mid-tail keywords, including the local area you are focusing on.

Link reclamation

Links at the top of a page carry more weight than those further down. It becomes a nightmare for a business owner to discover that that his/her main business website has been penalized by Google. Not all declines in rankings are caused by penalties but only a fraction of those. Google’s web indexing system favors recently updated content, especially for time-sensitive searches. 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.

Steer clear of old-school SEO methods

Adjusting your keyword distribution gives you power to change your campaign over time. Look at any forums, blogs, message boards or other chat services you might be using. In many of these environments, it is acceptable for users to give contact information and even drop links to their websites, as long as they do it in a certain way. How recently your webpage was published is also a ranking signal – but different types of searches have different freshness needs, such as searches for recent events, hot topics, and regularly recurring events.2 According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "The total number of backlinks can often include many links from the same referring domain or multiple referring domains. It’s common for referring domains to link back to your content if it is relevant, authoritative or useful in some way to their own domain."

SEO long term best practice

Getting the technical details of search engine-friendly web development correct is important, but once the basics are covered, you must also market your content. Some sites have the same URL for both desktop and mobile content, but change their format according to User-agent. In other words, both mobile users and desktop users access the same URL (i.e. no redirects), but the content/format changes slightly according to the User-agent. One issue often cited by those who believe links aren’t as important to SEO today is that they believe that spammers have made them less useful as a ranking signal. Directory Submission is important to Search Engine Optimization, especially for younger websites that don’t have links built all over the Internet already. It is an easy and free part of the Search Engine Optimization process which many novice webmasters ignore. If you want your website to succeed, don’t forget those directories.