In the same way a landscape architect needs to understand the elements of the property he is designing for in order to achieve the goals of the project, you need to understand how your website stacks up to your competitors, what gold (or iron) may be underneath the surface, and how your surrounding environment can impact the outcome of your campaign. It’s hard to imagine that just 10 years ago, SEO was a discipline governed by blackhat marketers whose sole objective was to increase rankings and drive traffic. Long story short—it wasn’t pretty, and Google didn’t like it. To achieve and maintain good placements on result pages (SERPs) over the long term, you should follow the search engine’s guidelines and focus on your target visitors (this approach is called “White Hat SEO”). Google and other search engines very quickly identify non-permitted, manipulative techniques and your website could be penalized. Keywords and link building are no longer as impactful as they once were; now, it’s all about creating valuable content. Google and other search engines are switching gears to focus on the relevance of the information you provide on your site. The “bots” that determine your site’s search engine ranking are crawling the web in search of sites that are conversational and have valuable content. (Not to creep you out, but Google’s system is critiquing your site like an extremely intelligent superhuman would.)

Actively seeking links can and should penalize your website

The shift to mobile devices has caused Google to change the methodology behind how it indexes and ranks websites. Many moons have passed since search engines interpreted information solely on simple information like keyword density, but keyword stuffing is still prevalent on many sites. The number of referring individual domains linking to your website or webpage is a very important factor in Google’s algorithm. Content marketing is about creating content that will help Google to find your site and posts and to ensure you rank highly in the search engine results pages. While this is a powerful and useful effect though, it's actually only one part of what content marketing is about.

Understand the different hosting options available

To a larger degree, your backlink profile is made up of backlinks from external sites (also known as referring domains) that contribute to the overall strength, relevance and diversity of your domain’s backlink profile. Producing content that ranks well is clearly an important part of writing for SEO. But it’s also about turning those visitors into paying customers. It is imperative that website owners and site developers engage in user testing. Without actually measuring what users are doing when they visit a site, one can’t possibly know how a website is performing. Use search engine friendly permalinks. Try not to have too many ‘&’, ‘?’, ‘!’ etc characters in the URL. Sometimes it is unavoidable but try to keep it to a minimum.

How can you find out, whether your domain has been penalized by Google and why?

Every time a search engine finds your website next to your competitors, it tells them that your company is in a related niche. Search engines also assess, in great detail, the technical aspects of your website. For example, how quickly the site loads plays a major role in your website ranking. Search engines also take into account how accessible your server is. Because, ultimately, Google and other search engines want to provide the best possible search results. So, the aim is to guide visitors to sites which work well, and which can always be accessed and used. When it comes to out-competing competitor pages, you are going to have to look at what the top competing page is doing when it comes to main content text. Chances are – they have some unique text on the page According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "Once you’ve identified opportunities you’ll want to decide on whether to create a new page from scratch or to make changes and improvements to one of your current web pages. Google is looking for answers to the user’s query that provides the answer to the question in a succinct manner. Formatting your HTML and providing content that clearly answers the question will help you rank well."

Use Headers — Wisely

Long-form content is a magnet for long tail searches. The more searchers and visitors you attract, the more you can ‘satisfy’ and the better chance you can rank higher in the long run. If you make a website from scratch, you need to take a few SEO related things into account. It’s incredibly important to do this right from the start, as that will prevent a vast number of future headaches. Speaking from experience, I have often seen product manufacturers describe a product from their point of view. Social shares are important because they help your blog post get discovered, so getting more shares and Retweets on social media networks is never a bad thing for your SEO efforts.