A website’s quality, design, content, and usability are huge factors. The performance of a website from a technical and user-experience aspect is becoming a stronger component to achieving top results. Anchor text has been a huge talking point within SEO for many years now. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the work involved to improve a website and promote it to increase visibility on search engines, which usually translates into an increase in organic visitor traffic relevant to your website. Additionally, it’s the application of using each search engine’s best practices to optimize a site and in doing so, keeping user experience first. If you get too far into the SEO rabbit hole you’ll start stumbling upon spammy ways to attempt to speed up this process. Automated software like RankerX, GSA SER, and Scrapebox, instructions to create spam or spin content, linkwheels, PBNs, hacking domains, etc.

See the content whose rankings are high on the pages

Build links as if Google didn’t even exist – links that will bring you customers in addition to rankings. 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. Low-quality links can lead to a higher bounce rate and click-through rates, which can eventually degrade the ranking of your site on search engines. Because Google likes sites that link out to good quality content, publishing your own curated content can be a very smart move.

Are you seeing the effects of Google +1 on your SEO?

Search engines have only recently started providing better tools to help webmasters improve their search results. This is a big step forward in SEO and the webmaster/search engine relationship. Search engine guidelines have evolved from the long-running abuse of search algorithms by aggressive Web marketers. Most of the guidelines put into place by Bing, Google, and other search engines are reactions to deceptive marketing practices. The guidelines are as close as you will get to having a check list of things that lead to penalties and algorithmic downgrades. Today, due to the way backlinks are evaluated based on different industry-related ranking factors, it is less quantity focused and more about the quality of sites from which the links are coming. Every “vote” or link to your site helps determine the value of your site. However, it’s not just the sheer number of links your website gets.

Advanced on-page SEO principles

It’s all very well to know what problems you can look for and fix to improve the stability of your rankings. However, as with everything, prevention is better than cure. Once you’ve identified and fixed the SEO elements causing your problems, whether they are issues described in this post or otherwise, you owe it to yourself and your business to create a proper SEO plan for your website. Submitting a sitemap to search engines reflecting any updates will certainly aid your cause. According to Google, a sitemap is “ a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.” Don’t put off submitting your sitemap! Keyword research is the process SEOs use to find what search queries consumers enter into a search engine for a given topic. You will find that there are a number of different ways to do keyword research, but there is no single “right” way. It will vary based on your industry, budget, and goals. Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "Instead of focusing on what you do or what you sell or why you’re awesome, instead focus on why your customers should care."

Fulfill your title’s promise

Keyword-based titles help establish page theme and direction for your keywords. High Flesch-Kincaid readability score (readability) - If your content needs a Literature major to be deciphered, then you're probably not going to get a lot of links. Why? Because if they don't understand it, they have no reason to link to it. There are a number of tools that let you check how many links are pointing to a site and what the authority of those pages are. Unfortunately none of them are perfect — the only way to know what links are pointing to your site is to have crawled those pages. Timely topics are seasonal (like holiday recipes) or more focused on current events or news coverage. Timely topics have a much shorter lifespan, but can drive large bursts of traffic if done well.