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. A Google research recently revealed that four out of five …

The backlink is one of the strongest ranking signals for any site because they indicate its authority. Readability has never been more important. If you’re not familiar with this term, it refers to how easy a piece of copy is for the average reader to get through. Although many …

Companies that repeatedly add links to directories are also more likely to be seen as spamming, which raises automatic red flags with the search engines. Knowing where to find good keywords and the proper way to work them into a website’s copy is important, but it’s only a …

How the pages on your site are organized and structured affects your search engine rankings. It also affects your it’s user experience (UX). Basically, you want to make it easy for actual visitors and search engines to find stuff in your store. While there’s no denying the power …

Search Engine Optimization is a very hot topic on the World Wide Web. After-all, everybody wants to rank higher and come up on the first page of Google search and get more traffic. The basic thing you need to remember when doing SEO is that you want to get as …

Target niche keywords with low competition. This involves at least a little bit of figuring out what makes your business unique. Onpage optimization (AKA on-page SEO) refers to all measures that can be taken directly within the website in order to improve its position in the search rankings. 99% of …

When a brand fails to work on good customer service, the implications can be so dire to the extent of bringing down a company. 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 …

Most SEO firms will tell claim it takes 4 to 6 months to start seeing results. It varies wildly but that’s generally in the ballpark for most projects. Note that SEO results are cumulative & escalate over time. If you’re getting positive results after 6 months these will compound …

Your SEO writer and SEO expert should be able to communicate with each other and work together to ensure the content aligns with your goals. The URL parameter tools supply Google bots with information on how to handle URL with specific parameters. If you are using Bing, it comes with …

Keyword stuffing is simply the process of repeating the same keyword or key phrases over and over in a page. It’s counterproductive. It’s is a signpost of a very low-quality spam site and is something Google clearly recommends you avoid. A DoFollow link is a link which passes …

There are domains which are better to receive links from than others. These are domains that are “trusted” sources and have higher domain authority. Seeing which sites are currently ranking in the top results for a given keyword or keyword combination will help you understand and determine the online competition …

Links from a diverse range of websites are good, as too many links from the same domain can be seen as spammy. Yes, "content is king" – but that's only half the story. Imagine if Wikipedia, one of the world's most popular sites, offered no more than huge blocks of text …

Page load speed is also a ranking factor, especially for mobile. Your website loading speed is one of the most important rankings factors in Google. No one likes slow websites, and neither does Google. Search engine algorithms will surely crawl video content directly instead of just crawling the text based …

A variety of studies support the idea that Google incorporate social signals when ranking a webpage. If you’re pursuing SEO yourself, you’ll inevitably hear of Google’s SEO penalties. It is true that there are a lot of potential penalties out there for the unwary. And if you …

Social networks are an important source of traffic. Good content significantly raises the probability of the posts being frequently shared organically on social networks which helps you expand your reach. At the same time, you can also generate additional traffic through social channels. Social interactions are also registered by Google …

Another quick and easy strategy for hunting down long tail keywords again starts by searching one of your regular short, generic keywords. At the end of the search results page should be a list of related searches. These again can be used as long tail keywords themselves or used as …

The absence of a hard and fast definition of content allows for cross-genre experiments. Infographics, explainer videos, vlogs are products of such experiments. Visual images entertain users whereas written content provide them with new information. Infographics, which is the cross between the two, do both. The same applies to explainer …

Depending on what visitors are searching, you will get the ranking sticking to the same position in some days and fluctuating with a wider range on other days. The newest result isn’t always best – for less newsworthy topics, an in-depth and authoritative result that’s been around longer may …

Sitelinks can be a little bit of a double-edged sword: even if you can get Google to display them, they might not necessarily be the links you would have chosen to display. The Google algorithm incorporates hundreds, if not thousands, of signals when determining where pages rank for a search …

When it comes to improving the page rank of a webpage, none other than backlink comes to the rescue. Backlinks are so much effective, that implementing quality backlinks instantly works in improving search engine ranking for your web page. Your website must be easy for visitors to use if you …

The closer to the start of the title tag any given keyword is, the more likely it will be to rank for that keyword based query. You can also use Fetch as Google within the Crawl section of Google Search Console to render your site the way Google sees it …

I think it's good to have lots of content on the website given the 'long tail' nature of searchers' keyword queries. With all the searching your potential customers are doing, you can gain a great deal of information about exactly what they’re looking for. Inadequate traffic and lack of …

Target 500 to 1,000 words per post without sounding spammy or repetitive. Trust me — 500 words is not difficult when you know your business inside and out. I am already at 1,500 words for this post (unless my editor breaks out a Ginsu knife). Also, publish frequently. Try …

Make sure you pick a permalink structure that fits your goals. If you have a news site, it might make sense to add the publication date of the article to the URL. Google places importance on the amount your content is shared socially, they see this as a sign that …

Sometimes, all that you need are five to 10 relevant links, from authoritative sites, to begin seeing results from Google and other search engines. How recently your webpage was published is also a ranking signal – but different types of searches have different freshness needs, such as searches for recent events …

If you perform an SEO audit now and then, you make sure your website’s up-to-date. It should be part of your frequent site maintenance cycle, I think. All search engines deliver results based on relevancy and popularity, but how they determine what’s relevant is what differentiates them from …

Google has several bots: Googlebot (desktop), Googlebot (mobile), Googlebot Video, Googlebot Images, Googlebot News. For most websites, the Googlebots for desktop and mobile are the most important bots. A natural link profile has variety. The links come from different domains and links will have different strengths. Does the content add …

Links need to actually be of interest to the reader. They must be relevant to the reader’s concerns and answer a question, provide advice, show images or do something else that is beneficial to the reader. This might sound tough, but it’s really not. If you want to …

According to Google, no-follow provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines Don't follow links on this page or Don't follow this specific link. This helps websites prevent untrusted content or paid links. Guest articles are a good way of improving your branding and getting high-quality backlinks. This area …

Real SEO is all about helping Google understand the content of your website. It’s about steering, guiding and assisting Google. Not manipulating it. Links still matter. We should just think of them differently. Consider whether the links you attract will actually drive qualified traffic to your site, rather than …

Make sure you pick a permalink structure that fits your goals. If you have a news site, it might make sense to add the publication date of the article to the URL. Search engines see millions of searches a day, and over a period of years, these data can be …

Majestic’s Trust Flow is representative of link relevancy and ‘trust’. Contextual link building -- links that are surrounded by text in the body of content -- have a higher SEO value than links that appear in the footer or sidebar. Increasingly Google is moving away from giving keywords top priority when …

There are no firm guarantees as to how quickly new sites – or pages – will be crawled by Google and then appear in the search index. Google uses your meta data to interpret what your website is about and ranks the pages accordingly. While it is important to have your keywords …

When dealing with search engines, the term ‘relevance‘ describes the extent to which the content of a website corresponds to the search term used. I’m sure you already have some assumptions regarding your target audience’s needs and problems. You also have some tips on who they are and …

Troubleshooting technical errors and ensuring that your website is always accessible is one of the biggest hurdles to manage when thinking about good SEO practices over time. Every time a search engine finds your website next to your competitors, it tells them that your company is in a related niche …

Google is also now looking at things like bounce rates – how long someone spends on your website. And it is looking at how your site renders on mobile and how quickly it loads. You can now get penalized for typos and mistakes. SEO isn’t a quick tactic that will …

If Google and the rest of the search engines trust you and they respect the content you produce, you’ll climb the search rankings. There’s no shortcut to ranking on the first few pages of the search results. Search engines don’t trust your website at first. You have …

With your core keywords grouped into buckets based on exact local monthly search volume, you will most likely notice that the longer the search query, i.e. the more words in the phrase, generally the lower the search volume. Voice Search and Mobile-First Index might drastically change that, but we …

Focus on your customers, and take the right logistical steps to make sure that search engines can find your content. Focus on the ‘road less traveled’ with long-tail opportunities, and you’ll be set. One question that often arises in regards to HTML tags and linking is whether or not …

A form of content curation is to create a resource page for a given niche. Many bloggers pursue to create the best resource page for their given niche. They do it for the organic traffic and the social media shares coming from the authors of the featured articles. It isn't …

The most important thing to know about Google Answer Boxes is that they are powered by Google Knowledge Graphs. This is a system that targets assisting users to understand useful facts on people, places, things, and relation to each other. The age of backlinks matter. Links that have existed for …

Outreach to webmasters should be personalized. You can list reasons why you like their brand, think your brand would partner well with them or citing articles and other content they published are great ways to make them more receptive. Employ keyword targeting. This is the classic ranking signal for on-page …

Technical SEO is the basic foundation of any site. While it might not have a direct relation to page/site ranking, it supports all the other components and must be done with a lot of care. Another one of the best SEO tactics creates even more links to your site …

The tactic of improving your pages to earn more traffic through being more relevant to search queries, on-page SEO is something everyone can do. Our goal is to craft a page that helps the searcher achieve their goal, answering the intent of their search. Your efforts should focus on being …

The old times when all types of backlinks were considered good for SEO are long gone. For years, many webmasters relied on sloppy techniques and used automated tools to build hundreds of backlinks every day. Things have changed a lot since then. Google very quickly recognizes if a backlink matches …

Some businesses don’t like seeing their competition rank highly in the results along with them. But this might not be such a bad thing. You have to build relevance layer by layer to exist outside the wrath of “corrective” search engine algorithms. When it comes to word count, you …

Cloaking is a method which gives search engines the impression that a website carries content that is different to what users actually see: If you provide valuable information on your website for visitors, design a good user experience, and implement all the known algorithm factors, your website has a good …

Backlinks are the fuel that drive the engine. But the actual work is done by the internal links that help visitors quickly and easily move to the content they want. The reason why most people fail to get contextual backlinks from guest posts is because they do it the wrong …

Incorporating relevance and trustworthiness into your link building strategy is an essential part of your ranking efforts. Blog comments are a great way to promote content, diversify anchor text and build out a natural link profile. Web pages containing matching verbiage will have lower visibility in searches. The ways that …

Get contextual links to your site that’ll boost your organic performance on search engines. Search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300% The biggest challenge with SEO is that it’s ambiguous territory—but you shouldn’t let the uncertainty …