Starting a mobile strategy will take time and work, but the payoff is worth it as more people will continue to search and browse the web on their mobile devices. If your site is littered with lengthy, indecipherable URLs that don’t align well with the actual content of your site pages, restructuring your URLs should definitely be a priority during your next website redesign. Wondering where SEO comes into play here? While just like the searchers themselves, search engines prefer URLs that make it easy to understand what your page content is all about. The most recent ranking studies show that getting your website higher on the SERP involves more factors rooted upon relevancy than previously exposed. The pages which contain the most relevant content to each query are now appearing higher in the search results. Link building is always a hot topic within the SEO industry but it is getting harder and harder to secure quality links that won’t get you penalised, if Google web spam team decide to perform a manual review on your website.

How the Changes in HTML 5 Will Affect SEO?

A big part of Search Engine Optimization is optimizing your website to make it easier for visitors to navigate and use. Longer search phrases are the natural progression of the Internet population boom. As more and more information is placed online, it becomes increasingly difficult to find exactly what you're looking for. Keyword research can turn into a useful ally, especially if you bear in mind that you don’t always need to target the most obvious keywords. Helping search engines know what your site’s about at a quick glance is where a sitemap and metadata play a crucial role.

Content distribution best practices

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. Links are still a critical element to Google’s algorithm and their value needs to be protected. When building your content, it’s important to remember to give the crawlers enough to bite into. A hundred words typically isn’t enough copy for these crawlers to read and understand what the content is about. And this content shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords either, as some search engines (as you’ll learn in later sections) punish websites for keyword stuffing. When you add a link to your website, you are inviting users to leave your site.

The majority of your backlinks should be branded

Think of a sitemap as a list of files that give hints to the search engines on how they can crawl your website. Sitemaps help search engines find and classify content on your site that they may not have found on their own. Google has stated on the record that page loading speed is an SEO ranking signal. You can boost your site speed by using a CDN, compressing images, and switching to faster hosting. Web pages must contain a minimum number of words, feature targeted keywords and highlight local modifiers to ensure they appear prominently in relevant, organic search results. According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "It’s clear that there is a link between the websites which rank highly for a certain keyword and whether or not that keyword appears in its URL. However, this is unlikely to be the only factor that determines whether or not a site can rank well."

Time proven tips for better SEO rankings

Many specialized SEO tools can help you determine the popularity and the competitiveness of your possible keywords and can help improve your search engine ranking particularly in Google. When it comes to SEO, monitoring for keywords and changes in your website’s backlink profile is one of the most tedious tasks. Optimizing for search engines and creating keyword-targeted content helps a site rank for key search terms, which typically leads to direct traffic and referring links as more and more people find, use, and enjoy what you’ve produced. Since the Penguin algorithm update in September 2016, Google has been watchful for anchor text keyword density. Leaning on exact anchor text too frequently appears suspicious to the search engine, which could result in worsened SEO rankings.