The days of buying, selling, and trading links for rankings is long gone…and if you try to bring it back, you will be long gone as well. SEO results are only keenly felt long-term, and therefore it can be difficult for small business owners to see the value in taking time out of their day to write about their industry. Generally speaking, the more QUALITY websites that link to you, the better. More website links bring more traffic, and that helps boost your web traffic. More importantly, Google counts every link to your website as a vote of sorts. If you get a lot of good “votes” from other relevant and reputable websites, Google will reward you with higher rankings in the search engine results and you’ll get even more visibility and traffic. Google generates far more traffic than any of the other search engines, including Bing(Microsoft), Yahoo and all the other search engines combined, so being high on the Google search engine results is what it’s all about! Make sure you pick a permalink structure that fits your goals. If you have a news site, it might make sense to add the publication date of the article to the URL.

Monitor Brand Mentions

How do your competitors rank? Pick out a keyword for which you want to optimize your site. Check out the top 20 search results: Are your competitors somewhere in there? What is your ranking for this keyword? This information should help you to find a good niche for you and your keywords, where your competitors are not operating. It may also be that you find keywords for which it is worth joining the competition. Mobile devices have obviously exploded and Google has emphasized the optimizing websites for mobile users. By 2015 mobile search queries surpassed desktop ones – a seismic event in the evolution of search that can not be overstated in terms of significance. Optimizing for mobile devices is now nothing less than required. Its mobile-friendly ranking update came in two significant roll outs to date. The key is creating content ready to serve customers across various devices and platforms. Brands need to meet customers where they are in order to provide them information; but without data, this is impossible. Data can let brands know what their customers search for and what they want to see when they make these queries. Just like they have for on-page SEO, technical aspects of SEO have changed as search engines have become more sophisticated.

Links are glue for your site

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? Meta tags are the HTML elements that search engines and visitors find your content. It’s what they can see in a search engine and thus, it’s important to add value in a limited number of characters. SEO is the process of implementing strategies and techniques (both on site and off site) in an effort to achieve a higher rank in search results. Typically, the higher a site is in search results, the more visitors it receives. While many old-school SEOs believe that link building techniques are now largely ineffective (or at least less effective than they once were), links are still critical to getting high rankings.

Shift the focus from only SEO to provide a better user experience

A great way to up your SEO in a general sense is to regularly update your site with quality long-form content. This could be in the form of a video, a podcast, or more commonly, a blog. While uncovering and fixing technical issues has always been an important part of SEO, in the wake of Panda and Penguin, technical SEO has moved closer to the forefront. It's no surprise that the Internet contains massive amounts of spam. Some estimate as much as 60% of the web's pages are spam. According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "If you read something interesting on a blog, you should comment. Especially when a post is about something you may have written about yourself as well. In your comment, you can share your view on the matter. You could also place a link to one of your own blogs."

Add valuable insight to your repurposed content

Is your article hiding among millions of others, difficult to find and not being read as a result? If it is, you’re not alone; great research can go relatively unnoticed if it’s not highlighted and indexed in the right way. While there plenty of differences between SEO and content marketing, there are also many areas where they overlap. Taking advantage of this overlap and using it in your website is the quickest way to get more people to visit your site. It’s not just about creating quality content, but also about knowing your audience, to the extent that the content is useful and has more chances to be ranked higher in the search results for the relevant queries. Cloaking refers to an attempt to boost search result rankings by serving different content to Googlebot than to regular users. This causes problems such as less relevant results (pages appear in search results even though their content is actually unrelated to what users see/want), so Google takes cloaking very seriously.