The nature of having competitors mean that they will always be looking to beat you, gain ground if they are falling behind, or pull further ahead where possible. To do this, you have to accept that there is always opportunities, whether you are thinking outside of the box, improving content that has been created by a competitor or your own resource. A reputable website should have great content which is relevant to its specific industry. A site with random and incoherent articles will be spotted by Google quickly, as it’s clear that the site has been set up purely to link to other sites. This becomes a bad backlink. Satisfy your users’ intent. Give them the information they seek! Perhaps they are searching for formal wear. So, you are trying to rank for those things, tuxedos and formal dresses or wedding outfits, which are tough to rank for. Blogger outreach is a process of putting your product or content in front of relevant bloggers and journalists in your industry by sending them personalized emails. The primary objective of blogger outreach is to make website owners and people with a large audience talk about you and link to your website.

Steer clear of old-school SEO methods

The benefit of getting links from networks is low, whereas the risk of being penalised and losing rankings is high. Marketing is all about ROI. If you believe you can get a return on investment using only PBN links, then DO IT. For most people, it’s best to take the safe route and use more evergreen tactics. Focussing on understanding the intent of the user is not only because it helps in getting conversions or click throughs, it is also important for the SEO perspective and provide value to your visitors. It helps in creating a brand name with trust and accountability. A company may be able to identify thousands of keywords worth optimizing—but do they have a big enough SEO budget to handle that workload? Just like you should interview others, seize opportunities to be interviewed, no matter how small the audience is. The 5-600 words that take you 15-20 minutes can turn into a few highly authoritative contextual links.

Structure your content to meet your SEO needs

Don't forget that search/internet marketing is multi-faceted. Traditional Marketing 101 teachers would say to build a comprehensive plan for marketing. Don't just work the online factors, but create a sound strategy around offline marketing, using ideas like postcards, trade magazines ads, phone/sales work, word of mouth and additional tactics that can help create a "buzz" around your products and services. 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. Search engines scan captions and metadata separately, so remember to think about how you have tagged and named your original media files too. Good ways to boost readability include breaking up sub-topics within your content, using images and videos to help explain difficult concepts, and visually highlighting one or two quotable sound bites that illustrate key points.

If you use up-to-date SEO methods that play by the rules, you'll get results that last

It’s quite obvious that you have to add share buttons to your blog posts. Websites without social buttons feel like they are still living in the pre-social media era. But just adding random share buttons or embedding all the possible options may not the best idea. 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. 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. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "SEO can help a growing startup establish its presence and meet business goals."

Blog posts shouldn't only contain text

Think about what happens when you type a query into a search engine. The results you get back are simply a series of page titles and descriptions. Stop looking for quick wins and focus on building a trustworthy brand filled with incredible information. If you do that and you do just the smallest bit of marketing to give yourself a push, Google’s algorithm should do the rest and reward your enthusiasm! Good formatting can instantly improve your page’s readability. This, in turn, can improve your engagement rate. You’ve created a website and published it on the web, but now you’re probably wondering how people — the right people, those who’ll be interested in who you are and what you do — will find you. You’ve heard about search engine optimization, or SEO, but don’t have the first clue how it works.