Whether you purchase a separate domain (recommended) for your blog, or host it on a blogging service or a subdomain of your own site, try to ensure that your URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for. If you have plans to be in business for more than five years, you need to invest in SEO. You likely won’t see an immediate impact, but it has the potential to be the best return on investment for your business. It’s generally accepted that using copyright notices and legal disclaimers can be seen as a positive sign by Google as these will make your website look more professional and more like a ‘real business’. The benefits of guest blogging are endless and often underrated. By tapping into already established communities, you can increase your reputation, build high-quality backlinks, get more exposure to your website and much more.

Identify backlink opportunities

Social media platforms have all but taken over, and when it comes to SEO, they are a huge part of the strategy for any campaign. SEO’s need to have the skill and experience to help the client develop a social media strategy, deliver training and support, create policies and processes and ensure their clients up-skill accordingly so that social media contributes to the wider commercial objectives of the client not just the SEO objectives of the agency. When you write content that gets your audience excited, you’re more likely to accumulate social shares and links. But if you’re after links, you need to create content for people who are actually able to give you links. A headline is usually the first thing we notice when accessing a search engine, and this reminds us that a headline should be: valuable, relevant, simple and appealing.

Segmenting Your Site’s Audience

The three main pillars of Search Engine Optimization; content, links and site architecture will remain for years to come. Paid link-building is considered black hat SEO and is likely to incur a penalty. Content marketing has always been crucial but it is no longer enough to research several industry keywords, place them on your blog and rely on affiliate network to post links back to your site. Building backlinks is not enough. You also have to monitor every link your website is earning. Not knowing who links to you or when links are being removed can cost you a lot of traffic.

Getting clicks on your title is just half of the equation

An SEO campaign can deliver all the traffic in the world, but if none of the visitors ever becomes a customer then the campaign has not succeeded. Always Add Value. Add value in every blog post, blog comment, social media update and web page. Don’t worry about backlinks or keyword rank. People will read and share your valuable content, and the rest will take care of itself. Keep your descriptions under 150 characters to avoid a trail off (…). This shows visitors that you have intentionally put up an informative and helpful description, opposed to the randomly generated one that Google pulls for non-optimised pages. According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "Originally devised as a way to combat comment spam, when a nofollow attribute is added to a link it tells search engines that your link to it isn't necessarily a vote of confidence."

Be specific when the user wants a particular thing

Google has stated that meta descriptions are NOT a ranking signal. But, the quality of the description will influence click-through rate, so it is very important to use this element wisely… 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. SEO metrics give you an indication of the overall competitiveness of a niche. When your competitors have a high DR score they are likely to have been around for a while and acquired a solid backlink profile. Google is constantly evolving to better understand the context and intent of user behaviour.