Both 301s and canonical URLs can be used to solve for duplicate content issues. Strategically written website copy includes well-thought-out internal links and calls to action. 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 …

Hopefully your website is laid out in a way that allows users to easily find the content or pages that you want to promote. There are a lot of options to choose from to answer this question; but the most obvious and impactful, which ironically are the most overlooked, are …

Whether it is writing the most useful article about a certain topic, or ensuring that your eCommerce system is easy to use, it is important to make sure site visitors have a positive experience, because only then will they stick around. Too many times websites lose the interest of readers …

Although not as important as they used to be, reciprocal links do still matter with Google. Reciprocate with similar websites and include keywords near the links on your site. Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines …

A good trick is to dig into your Google Analytics to see the top visited pages on your site. Understanding your audience and the entire consumer journey so you can be visible at the moments when it matters most is mission critical now. The content on your website must be …

If you link to other websites, you not only help to promote their content, but also you let others know that you exist. Simple as that. And if you provide quality content, people whose work you’ve shared will be more willing to promote your website as well. Keywords or …

Keyword research must be updated periodically: Search terms fall out of disfavor as language changes, a company introduces new products and services, and so on. Have you ever monitored the viewing pattern of people visiting your website? This is the pattern in which people view, in this case, websites. aying …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

High-quality content on and off your website and using strategic link-building tactics (internal links and backlinks) is a critical component to achieving relevancy. This strategy protects the website’s viability against the frequent changes in Google’s rules and priorities. SEO is a long-term strategy, so it sometimes takes months …

After implementing any SEO technique, you need to monitor your efforts. Coming up with great content is important to the longevity of any website, but finding the right “hot” keywords to use and implementing them in ways which look natural and read in a fluid fashion is just as important …

One of the most important optimisation measures for a slow-loading website is caching. In normal web browsing, once a web page is generated, elements of its data are stored or cached, so the next time the page is requested by the same user, the server fulfilling the request doesn’t …

A significant factor affecting loading times in general is a website’s complexity: the more comparison tables, product images, page-design features your site has, the more scripts, stylesheets, image and HTML files must be loaded in the background. Target links from websites with high DAs, since the higher the DA …

Enter competitor’s domain on SimilarWeb.com to see where their visitors are coming from, which social networks they use and see what’s interesting for that audience. The days of self-serving, scammy, and spammy SEO are long-gone. And that’s a good thing. The ‘secret’ to success with SEO …

Outreach is a method of proactively acquiring backlinks to your website by contacting other website owners. The outreach process can involve any method of communication, but it typically happens via email and Twitter. The semantic analysis of a link’s value does go deeper than just the anchor text The …

This methodology has been very successful at improving overall whole page relevance while still being adaptable to new sorts of answers. You shouldn’t wait passively for people to finally decide to link to you. An SEO strategy that builds your website’s relevancy and authority in the desired geographic …

Redesigning your site gives you the perfect opportunity to make sure your URLs are optimized for UX and for search engines. Your URLs play a significant role in your SEO success. Your URLs must contain targeted and relevant keywords. Domain authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by …

Find sites that are relevant to your website but are not direct competitors. The more relevant the links, the more valuable it will be and therefore the easier it will be for them to explain why they are linking to your website. Many SEO campaigns start with keywords – knowing what …

Don’t forget to tell Google your site is mobile-proof. You can add a viewport declaration – if you’re using responsive design – or a Vary header when using dynamic serving. When a user visits a search engine, they type words into the search box to find what they are looking …

It's important to quickly address reputation management because as part of the evaluation process Google will analyze what other people say about your website. Constant changes to Google’s search rankings to hinder exploitative techniques and an algorithm that’s as hard to crack as KFC’s herbs and spices …

Any link to another part of the same site is called an internal link. As well as links you'd expect to find (within a site menu bar, for example) you can also create internal links by linking to past posts within newer ones. If you are planning to have more …

Searchers often enter refinements when the initial search doesn’t provide satisfactory results, but the results do provide clues on what to search for. Rather than default to a generic, automatically-generated URL, take time to think about how users would search for your content and include one of those phrases …

You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search results. If you do want to prevent search engines from crawling your pages, Google Webmaster Tools has a friendly robots.txt generator to help you …

A great way to incorporate all those valuable local keywords into your website is to create valuable content. Fresh, unique content has great SEO benefits, but it will also help to establish you as a reputable, reliable and knowledgeable business. Plus, you can use it for link-building efforts and share …

Mobile searches have become more common than ever; which is why it is imperative that you ensure the compatibility of the different pages on your website with mobiles and other devices. Producing content for search engines is also content marketing, list building, and relationship marketing. The process is iterative, so …

Putting your individuality and personality across throughout the off-site SEO process (outreach emails, guest posts, social shares, etc.) makes others more likely to engage with you. Craft your unique selling proposition (USP) based on your own personality and the way you can best solve your customers’ problems. Fast web pages …

We can judge a site visually in as little as 50 milliseconds. And when performing a task, we focus on that and become blind to anything else. In some cases on-page coding issues can impede the ability of a website to rank well in search engines whilst in others there …

Think of yourself as an asset portfolio manager, because that’s what you are. In the same way fund managers need to analyze company financial data and operational performance before making investment decisions, you need to analyze your SEO competitors to inform your investment decisions. Content is king when it …

A cornerstone of effective SEO is producing quality content, and understandably, that can be difficult for marketers or business owners busy with other things. Although word count doesn’t rule the SEO world – nobody will read your stuff if it’s not helpful to them. Helping search engines know what …