In addition to the actual text on your web pages, search engines also examine their structure, the use of keywords in your URLs, the formatting of the page (such as the use of bold font), and which keywords appear in the title and in the body of the text. 9 out of 10 people users make use of Search Engines to find an answer to their query. When these users type in their keywords/query, the Search Engine’s bots and spiders run their complex algorithms, scan through the giant database that has been crawled and indexed by them. They, then come up with results (websites) whose keywords matches with that of the query. One of the best tools available to help you measure the success of your SEO campaign is Google Analytics. This fantastic and free tool can be used to monitor how much traffic you’re getting to your website and where this traffic is coming from. You can easily identify pages that are working well for your business, as well as highlighting areas for potential improvement. Whether you purchase a separate domain (recommended) for your blog, or host it on a blogging service or a subdomain of your own site, try to ensure that your URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for.

Caution! Links don’t count in some cases

Do some keyword research and create a list of all the keywords for which you want to be ranked on search engines. Sort this list by priority or relevance to your business. And divide the words into “transactional” or “informational” keywords. Transactional keywords include a clear user intention to such as “buy red sneakers.” Informational keywords, in contrast, focus on obtaining information. Buyers are in this phase, for example, when they want to know more about a product before they buy it. Every search engine gives different weights to these ranking factors which is why when you enter the same search term in different search engines you will generally get different results. Understanding what your customers and users want to learn and know is exactly how you should be developing your SEO strategy. SEO is not hard. It does, however take time – it involves technical tweaks on your website, competitive analysis/content strategy, and building links from around the web.

Horses for courses

Google’s featured snippet is a tool through which Google interacts with searchers. The more inputs Google receives from searchers, the better becomes its understanding of what they want. Getting your content out there and shared generously should be your goal. Make sure the content is better than what already is ranking for your keywords; provide unique value and a fresh perspective on the topic. Consider your exposure options for your content, and get your content out to as many options as possible. Authority is measured by the quantity and quality of inbound links to your site, as well as its technical performance and structure. Before entering a new market, it’s crucial to do a proper market analysis and identify the opportunities and threats that you could encounter.

Gathering your social profile linking domains

When you delete a page (or post) from your site, you delete one or more URLs too. That old URL, when visited, will usually return a 404 not found error. But is that what you wanted? Maybe that page should be redirected somewhere. Be informative. Above all else, ensure you have informative content. The most entertaining writing doesn’t make you an authority on much more than entertainment. Although there are many different "recipes" for gaining search engine rankings, most experts in the search engine optimization (SEO) field will recommend that website content should be a priority. Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "If your page title is too long (currently 400 to 600 pixels), it will get cut off in Google. You don’t want potential visitors to be unable to read the full title in the SERPs."

Featured snippet opportunities

As Google continues to prioritize the user experience in its algorithm, this data can become critical. It’s one thing to provide a list of items that generally lead to a better user experience (like we did above), but it’s another thing completely to be able to address extremely specific elements of that experience. If you can’t budget for 6 to 12 months of SEO, you might be better off putting that budget somewhere else. It may not be a good idea to link to the website from footers or sidebars. Ranking potential is an assessment of where you can realistically hope to get your rankings to; if the top 5 websites have a DA of 90+ and your website is at 20, it is not realistic to think that you will be able to grab one of the top 5 spots in no time. Again this is not always the case, but tends to generally be a safe standard of procedure.