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 some extra local traffic boost and an improvement in your search engine placements. Google follows links. Links are important. So get the word out. Reach out to other site owners – preferably of topically related websites. One of the problems international businesses continuously need to address is identifying themselves as “local” in the eyes of the search engines. It’s a new era for SEO, an era where you can no longer keyword-stuff your way to search ranking success. Nowadays, if Google finds out that you are blatantly overusing (or hiding) keywords on your site, your credibility (and rankings) could take a serious hit. However, this doesn’t mean that keywords are totally irrelevant. In fact, if you’re doing what Google wants you to do (creating high-quality content), keywords will work there way naturally into your website’s pages.

Does Cross linking works as an SEO strategy?

Did you know Google uses around 200 ranking factors to rank websites? This may be a lot for SEOs to take in all at once. However, focusing on links is still best practice. Have you ever wondered why Google.com delivers different results for a user in the US than for a user in Germany? The biggest SEO mistake you can make during a website redesign is to not think about SEO until it’s too late. If you don’t have SEO in mind from the initial strategy session, you’re going to lose what you took so much time and effort to build. Get specific by taking a structured approach. It’s not enough to focus on the right keyword—you need to make sure that you’re communicating the ‘right’ information to Google in a structured way.

Build a mobile-friendly site

The rule of thumb is to use each keyword combination once per 100 words of content. While most SEO gurus preach that a web page should include 300 to 1,000 words of unique content, it’s important to remember that you’re writing for people, not robots. Keep it natural. We thirst for conversation rather than being lectured. Those who merely push their message and never listen or engage usually are not as successful. So when someone comments on your blog or on your social media post, engage with them. You never know who has a website or blog. You never know who will build upon your knowledge and create their own post referencing your original post as a citation! SEO has tremendously grown over the past few years and search engines are getting smarter and smarter. Staying on top of the current updates and changes is thus crucial in deepening your knowledge of how to take advantage of it. The meta description is not a ranking factor, but it does play an important part in optimizing your Click Through Rate (CTR).

Revel in constraints (not restraints)

Google has a free tool that allows you to test the mobile-friendliness of your website. As hinted at earlier, companies need to create a responsive website instead of creating desktop websites and expecting them to work on mobile. Prioritise content marketing. That's publishing valuable content on your website. These can be articles, blogs, white papers, videos, infographics or other interesting information that can be shared with your network via an e-newsletter or social media. Doing this will create backlinks naturally. SEO and content marketing are, technically speaking, two very different beasts, and yet, they go together hand in hand. One relies on the other for success, and vice versa. Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "Include the right rich snippets, don’t add schema.org markup just to inform Google about all the other stuff you do."

Identify and Track Your Best Prospects

Development of a prioritized list of targeted search terms related to your customer base and market segment. An increase in the number of external sites linking to a piece of content can be seen as an indicator of relevance and freshness Finding a good balance between the various “free” forms of building Back Links and the Pay Per Click advertising many people are using today is key to getting your Back Links covered. Fundamentally, SEO is a marketing discipline, not a technical one meaning that an understanding of basic marketing principles is essential. Nothing is more important to a successful marketing strategy than a strong understanding of the audience you are looking to attract.