I spent years and years focusing on doing nothing but building backlinks. The social hit and I had to change my focus. Now links are back as number #1 again, but honestly, did they ever really stop being the top factor? If you do decide to use an image as a link, filling out its alt text helps Google understand more about the page you're linking to. Imagine that you're writing anchor text for a text link. Don't use any shady tactics that will get you into hot water like sneaky redirects, content cloaking, and so on. Sometimes knowing why you’re doing something can make all the difference.

Use Short And Descriptive URL Permalink

Link Exchange is another good way for building links. However, you need to be careful with this one. I am not asking to go around ‘asking people for links’. Just move subtly with it. Review your h1 tags across your site, using a crawler to find them all if required. Do they all describe the page accurately? Do they use the keyword target? And do they match the title tag in what they say the page is about? Follow links are links that Google bots and humans can follow. The bot reaches the links and then continues onto the next page, bringing some value from the source site. Visitors who really like the look or feel of a website are more likely to recommend the website to their friends, coworkers, family members and other people with whom they are close – people just have a way of sharing the things they like, as well as the things they dislike.

Domain authority (DA) is NOT the ultimate metric

A lot of SEOs will tell you to fix the foundation of your website, meaning the template. I think content is the foundation of the website and your template(s) should serve that content. Google recognizes that a site might have two versions on the same page (web version and printer friendly version), and this duplicate content is actually meant to make for a better user-experience, and not trick the search engines. The day may come when links are less important to rankings, but that day hasn’t arrived yet. Optimizing a blog is very similar to optimizing a website, and optimizing a blog post similar to optimizing a web page. But depending on the blogging service or software you use, the results may look somewhat different.

Why won’t people engage with my content?

SEO and SEM tactics are not disappearing any time soon, so why not use them to your advantage? There are a lot of people using search engines to look for what you have to offer, and in the area you are offering them in. Every business needs a marketing strategy and so does a website. The best strategy to market any website is through SEO management. SEO today is increasingly driven by natural language search, that is, people doing searches that are more like normal questions than two or three keywords. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Despite previous assumptions, a link from a 301 redirected page shouldn’t lose any PageRank compared to a link from a non-301 redirected page."

Enable broswer caching

Often, the best SEO strategy is to focus on long tail terms—search terms that are highly specific, relevant, and with strong buying intent. Use the rel=nofollow tag in the links to websites that you do not trust, you think maybe using spamming techniques or you do not want to help in the search engines. Use sub-directories rather than sub-domains when possible. Sub-domains do not share link love from the main domain as it is treated as a different domain. You can signal relevancy of your content to search engines by using keywords for your image file name, alt tag, title, description and caption.