One of the basic tools of the trade for an SEO practitioner is the search engines themselves. They provide a rich array of commands that can be used to perform advanced research, diagnosis, and competitive analysis. If everyone’s mobile device had a screen size and the power of a …

Some directories cost money in order to be accepted into their listings. Once again, while some of these can pass legitimate value, others pass little and aren't worth your time or money. Producing content that ranks well is clearly an important part of writing for SEO. But it’s also …

While there’s no denying the power of paid marketing channels such as Google AdWords, establish your organic presence and you will likely find your most profitable marketing channel. Understanding how your website visitors find you will help you determine if your SEO, marketing or networking efforts are paying off …

Go out of your way to consistently create detailed content that brings enormous value to the end user, and you'll be on your way to dominating search. Domain authority is more insightful than PageRank because it’s measured on a scale of 0-100, but it’s not perfect. When optimizing …

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. While doing a backlink audit, analyzing toxic backlinks and removing them can be a lengthy and tedious process …

Principally, technical SEO is concerned with how a website works, and how search engines are able to crawl and index our pages. Think of technical SEO as the foundations of your site – without it, whatever beautiful building you create won’t be as sturdy as you’d like. The most …

Many website owners neglect to spend the time analyzing how their page structure actually looks and works for the visitor. A good trick is to dig into your Google Analytics to see the top visited pages on your site. There are a number of methodologies ranging from complex formulas including …

Instead of writing on-page copy for the sole purpose of repeating a keyword multiple times, you should write about your product or service or idea naturally, and let your keyword variations naturally fall into place. If that doesn’t happen, go back and spring in some variations into the content …

Link building is also spreading brand awareness and capturing referral traffic. Using SEO best practices should be a part of your foundation when it comes to creating content, not only on your website, but with your social media posts as well. Google is constantly evolving to better understand the context …

A big part of Search Engine Optimization is optimizing your website to make it easier for visitors to navigate and use. Backlinks from relevant sites in your niche are also worth significantly more than irrelevant sites or pages The most important user signals are the bounce rate and the click-through …

Which relevant search terms are most popular? Many companies err by assuming a particular term is popular. They put all of their efforts into being number one for a term few people care about—an enormous waste of SEO resources. An organic search strategy that involves a dedicated consumer focused …

SEO is not about one-time actions. It is a continuous optimization process. One crucial basis for optimization is valid data about user behavior. Regular monitoring is one of the key tasks of search engine optimization that makes it possible to quickly react to traffic decline or other occurrences. It’s …

People don’t read on the web; they scan. To make scanning easier, use plenty of clear and informative sub-headers to guide readers down a page. Google has stated that meta descriptions are NOT a ranking signal. But, the quality of the description will influence click-through rate, so it is …

Since the advent of Panda and Hummingbird, LSI is becoming increasingly important in SEO as it’s used by Google to determine between ‘keyword stuffed’ articles and genuinely relevant content. A very common approach for cross linking is by doing footer/sidebar links and content deep linking. For search engines …

Use your website to communicate your value proposition and your general marketing messages (known as “high-level messages”). If there is one page which should be optimized for generic keywords, it is your homepage. When you've selected your focus keyword, ensure it is found in your title tag, h1 tag, meta …

Add structured data markup in your website's code to include vital business information for Google to find and showcase. Essentially, try to keep in mind that Google no longer works by trying to match the search terms exactly in your content. You can see this yourself when you search Google …

Generally speaking, backlinks are considered to be a “vote” of confidence for the content that’s being linked to on your domain from outside sources. Titles display what your page is about to both visitors and search engine crawlers, while meta descriptions summarize the content of your page. Your title …

When you add a new page to your website under the blog section, for example, you add a ‘slug’ onto the end of the URL structure that is already in place. The slug refers to the next few words that relate to your new page Appropriate use of headers are …

There’s no point in creating new content if it’s not authentic enough to stand out. Even if you come up with an idea from a different source, it’s still up to you to offer your unique perspective that will add value to the particular topic. Test the …

Only Google engineers know the secret google recipe! Google answers your search queries by checking them against it's enormous index of web content. Google continuously searches the internet using googlebots that scout for new web content to add to the index. Choosing a perfect focus keyword is not an exact …

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 …

If you want to achieve a higher ranking on Google and other search engines, you’ll need to get serious about search engine optimization. Search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300% If you don’t know where to submit a …

It’s the number one thing you’ll be working on when you’re trying to improve mobile SEO: performance. In this case, performance almost entirely boils down to site speed. It’s a given: the faster your site is, the happier your users will be. Remember, great quality and …

It seems the world is going mobile, with many people using mobile phones on a daily basis, and a large user base searching on Google’s mobile search page. However, as a webmaster, running a mobile site and tapping into the mobile search audience isn't easy. Add a site map …

The total number of backlinks can often include many links from the same referring domain or multiple referring domains. It’s common for referring domains to link back to your content if it is relevant, authoritative or useful in some way to their own domain. Great images compliment great website …

Links aren't everything in SEO, but search professionals attribute a large portion of the engines' algorithms to link-related factors. Take a look at your top ranking and most shared content. Is there overlap? If you’ve found a type of content that is simultaneously strong in search and frequently shared …

In the search marketing field, the pages the engines return to fulfill a query are referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The freelance world might disagree with me but frankly I do not think there is not an SEO in the world who can lay claim to having …

Whenever doing a website redesign, I think it’s so important to reassess the purpose of each page. If you don’t learn anything from the page, neither will your viewers! Building out a navigation map that takes SEO into consideration will save you a lot of heartache throughout your …

Google has worked to smash black-hat and spam-based link-building practices, penalizing link wheels, exchanges and paid links. In 2012 the Penguin update ushered in the link building reality we experience today. With it only natural link accumulation will gain your website & webpages authority. Content marketing can be very effective in …

If you are a local business, register with trusted local directories. By submitting your company to business directories (especially the free directories) you cannot expect to be flooded with high quality traffic and transform your website into a high-converting lead generation machine. What you should be expecting though, is getting …

The entire mentality of a search engine is to provide the best possible result to the searcher that satisfies their original search query. They do this by evaluating a site’s content in reference to the search and the quality of the site and its content. Have you ever monitored …

There are ways to do a bulk search on a list of URLs to check if any of the pages contain a link to yours, but if you're checking this on a daily basis, it's probably just as fast to do a quick manual check. Analyze search engine rankings and …

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the techniques to use in order to achieve a greater volume of traffic to your site. Without a good number of people visiting your web page, you won’t be able to expose your site to potential customers. Remember how people say …

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. Meta tags are pieces of HTML code …

The other point that has become increasingly important is that relevant anchor text should be used in links. This applies not just to external links pointing into your site, but internal linkages throughout your Web site. If everyone’s mobile device had a screen size and the power of a …

Websites that are popular and have a lot of links shared on social media tend to perform well on the search engines. These sharing signals are picked up by the search engines which look at the links being shared to help assess the popularity of a webpage and whether it …

One issue often cited by those who believe links aren’t as important to SEO today is that they believe that spammers have made them less useful as a ranking signal. Always remember to find natural local keywords. Simply stuffing in unnecessary mentions of the residing town may actually do …

Ask your customers for reviews, mark them up with structured data and present them on a particular page on your site. This might do wonders. The pages have to create unique enough value that they can be distinguished from other similar pages by the search engines. Lacking that intrinsic value …

Your website must be set up to track the sources of conversions accurately; otherwise, you won't know which search engines produce the most leads—and you won't be able to continuously improve your SEO campaign. SEO takes some time. There’s no legitimate way around that. But SEO is also …

Content marketing is about creating content that will help Google to find your site and posts and to ensure you rank highly in the search engine results pages. While this is a powerful and useful effect though, it's actually only one part of what content marketing is about. Another major …