Over the years many people have tried to game the system by creating content that is stuffed full of keywords in the hope that repeating their keyword phrases over and over again will in some way get them to the top spot of Google. While this tactic may have worked in the 90’s and early 2000’s it is time to put this to bed and stop creating content that is written solely for the search engines. These search engines have evolved and now recognise and reward natural language so the best piece of advice is to write naturally and for humans. Giving readers relevant information and links to interesting third party websites is definitely the easier of the two methods for creating quality links. Link Building is about more than just giving people the information they asked for though; if they never see those links, then those links aren’t really any good. Make sure content is not buried inside rich media (Adobe Flash Player, JavaScript, Ajax) and verify that rich media doesn't hide links from crawlers. Ideally, if you’re running your own small business, doing your own writing establishes you as the authority. Everyone likes to deal with the owner, and this provides a way to establish many relationships with customers simply through generating your own content.

Writing a headline to reach out to multiple audiences may seem like a smart move

We all know that getting backlinks (a.k.a. inbound links) from trusted websites is a great way to give your website’s search rankings a boost. However, there’s also a dark side to backlinks. If Google suspects that there are spammy, low-quality sites linking to your site, your rankings could suffer. This is known as “negative SEO”. (In some cases, spammers will purposely direct lots of low-quality links to your site in order to cause negative SEO.) If you have plans to be in business for more than five years, you need to invest in SEO. You likely won’t see an immediate impact, but it has the potential to be the best return on investment for your business. SEO is simply not as hard as people pretend like it is; you can get 95% of the effort with 5% of the work, and you absolutely do not need to hire a professional SEO to do it, nor will it be hard to start ranking for well-picked key terms. The ultimate goal of any marketer is to create a diverse range of high quality backlinks from various credible sources. But not all marketers tend to achieve this pinnacle. It takes time and patience and a lot of strategizing and in the end it is never that straight forward and many marketers in the process tend to compromise on the quality of such links and end up deterring their own websites with toxic links.

Getting SEO to take off can take time and patience

The backlinks you want pointing to your site are natural, authentic, industry-related and authoritative. When building your content, it’s important to remember to give the crawlers enough to bite into. A hundred words typically isn’t enough copy for these crawlers to read and understand what the content is about. And this content shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords either, as some search engines (as you’ll learn in later sections) punish websites for keyword stuffing. Keywords are less often used nowadays as the first signal to indicate what your post is about, but they are still helpful to offer an overview of the topic you’re focusing on. Keywords should appear in important on-page elements like the page title, heading, image alt text, and naturally throughout the page copy, but you should still be sure to craft each of these items for humans, not search engines

How To Rank in Google NOW: Google Ranking Factors

When optimizing for conversion, it is critical to gain some perspective into the psychographics of your target audience, and also understand the most common segments of search intent. You should also be looking for niche relevant profile opportunities. Is there a prominent industry community that you can get a link from via a profile? If so, these usually go further than general opportunities that would make sense for really any website. Build a list of other niche blogs in your field. Start commenting on their blogs with insightful comments, and then reach out to them and ask if you can write one guest post for them. If they accept, write NEW content for their blog (don’t just copy and paste something already existing on your blog). Remember to include a couple links within your post linking back to your site, using anchor text with your relevant keywords. According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "At one time, directories like DMOZ were a good place to add listings and get backlinks. However, these large web directories aren’t really relevant anymore."

Use Headers — Wisely

Content strategy and execution is a discipline in its own right. If you are looking to build a genuinely compelling brand experience shortcuts cannot be taken. The benefits of guest blogging are endless and often underrated. By tapping into already established communities, you can increase your reputation, build high-quality backlinks, get more exposure to your website and much more. Make it easier for search engines to index your website. The type of content you use on a page also matters for indexing. For example, images are indexed differently from text. It is customary to ensure that meaningful images are assigned descriptive “ALT=” text and helpful captions. Image galleries can be challenging, especially when the image owners (often artists or photographers) are reluctant to publish high quality images or visible text on a page.