When a search engine spider crawls your website it cannot rate its design nor measure the level of your customer support or the services you offer. It can only read and grade the content on your website and the way you have managed your backlinks. Hence, there is a huge emphasis on the quality of the content on your site and the backlink structure you have adopted and exactly why link building is so important. Major search engines, including Google, provide free tools for webmasters. Google's Webmaster Tools help webmasters better control how Google interacts with their websites and get useful information from Google about their site. It’s also still worth pursing Wikipedia links when appropriate. Wikipedia is very picky about their references, so you’ll have to provide very niche, unique content, but if you can get a link it can bring about some pretty cool results – including other do follow links. Although it may feel like Google is trying to make our jobs as inbound marketers more difficult, they ultimately want to provide the best user experience, which should be the goal of your website as well.

Find Sites Linking To More Than One Competitor

Make sure the site makes good use of anchor text in its internal links. This is a free opportunity to inform users and search engines what the various pages of your site are about. Don’t abuse it, though. Online search is a murky world for those looking to be found at the top of Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). All sites have a home or "root" page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting place of navigation for many visitors. Unless your site has only a handful of pages, you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific content. Many years ago, Google put together its search quality team, which is responsible for ensuring users get the best possible user experience by making sure that key signals of quality websites align well with results on search engine pages. Their job description is straightforward “A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which among the billions of pages on the web to show them — and in what order.”

Keyword clustering examples

Set up a Google Alert for your company name. Any time your business is mentioned across the web, contact the webmaster, thank them, and ask them nicely to include a link. Once you are done with cleaning up all the toxic backlinks pointing to your site, you need to file a reconsideration request with Google. This has to be polite and detailed, stating that you admit the mistakes you have committed, explaining the steps that you took to correct the same and promising to use nothing, but best practices for link building and SEO. At the heart of your local SEO campaign will be building the number of listings you have. In other words, the amount of places you can add your business, and get a citation. Often it is assumed that only business directories count, but actually there are number of ways to expand your portfolio. Google is getting better and better at recognizing content that truly is useful to people.

Minify CSS and JS

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. An organic search strategy that involves a dedicated consumer focused approach is highly recommended. This entails total brand presence and not just keywords, understanding customer behavior, consumption preferences, needs and conversion paths. Make sure that your site’s structure and hierarchy are as clear and logical as possible, with your homepage as the “root” page (the starting point). Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "Design your site for all device types and sizes, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Use the mobile friendly testing tool to test how well your pages work on mobile devices, and get feedback on what needs to be fixed."

Use anchor text

In the same way that it takes time to improve your SEO rankings with improvements built up over time, the reverse is true for when you stop optimising your website. At first, your rankings will continue as before but over time you’ll notice that your website rankings will start to drop. Algorithm updates, competitor improvements and loss of links will all negatively impact on your rankings and put you back to square one. An effective link building strategy that simply makes a lot of sense is fixing broken links on your site and on sites that you’d like a link from. Your first step is to look for broken links on pages that interest you. After finding the links that go to pages that no longer exist, you reach out to the website owner and point out the link and suggest a new page that could provide value to their audience. For sites “with just a few things to mark up,” Google also offers a tool within Search Console that allows a site owner to quickly click-and-drag to apply structured data. If you aren’t seeing a positive ROI after a month or two, try changing tactics and/or improve your methods until you start seeing positive momentum.