One of the best ways to get links when you’re first starting out is to ask people you know to link to your site from their site using a target keyword as the anchor text -- the text being used as the link to your site. Use your network of customers, partners, vendors, and even friends/family around the world to link to your site, and ask them to link to the right locale site. The methods vary from technical practices you can achieve behind the scenes on your website (we tend to refer to this as ‘on-page SEO’) to all the promotional ’off-page’ approaches you can use to raise your site’s visibility (link-building, social media marketing). Getting your site to rank in Google can be a tough slog. It requires knowledge of current ranking factors, as well as the time and ability to optimize your content for those factors. SEO is very simple, and unless you’re a very large company it’s probably not worth hiring somebody else to do.

What are sitelinks?

Review competitive lists and other pertinent industry sources. If your online business isn’t taking advantage of all that SEO solutions offer, you’re bound to fall short of the competition. Expect increased conversions, particularly those from visitors who arrived via organic search. A site can never have enough content. There is always an opportunity to create new pieces of content, and the newness – or ‘freshness’ – of content is also one of Google’s ranking signals.

Start searching the targeted keyword

Stop words are the small words in your SEO phrase, such as up, with, is, a, etc. While it’s widely accepted as a best practice to remove these from your SEO phrase, sometimes removing them can actually hurt your SEO. For example, “What is a graco taco?” makes a lot more sense than “what graco taco.” So while many SEO plugins and search experts will advise you to remove stop words, sometimes it’s best to leave them in if they drastically impact the meaning of the phrase. Be your own judge. The One Percent Rule states that only a tiny fraction of people within any online community actually create content. The other 99% of users consume or contribute to content, but do not create. The key is creating content ready to serve customers across various devices and platforms. Brands need to meet customers where they are in order to provide them information; but without data, this is impossible. Data can let brands know what their customers search for and what they want to see when they make these queries. Even though it is not a surefire indicator of ranking potential, I still hold that it is important to first look at competitor’s DA when starting your SEO analysis. In my opinion this will allow you to gain at least some initial visibility into your ranking potential.

The first indication should be analytics

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. A lot of people think of link reclamation as just 301’ing pages they have moved that still have a lot of great backlinks. What we need to understand is that search engine optimization begins with the simplest of foundations: Create a Website that is easy to crawl, index, and match to queries people use. From that foundation we build greater complexity into our optimization methods and practices. According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "The number, accuracy and quality of your business' local citations improve its chances of featuring highly in search results."

Focus on YouTube SEO

Make the content flow easily to keep people intrigued and reading. One of my firm beliefs is that Google is becoming more and more ‘human,’ and should be treated that way. This means that in all your SEO efforts, you should consider the use for us human visitors first, and then check if that aligns with any SEO recommendations. For some reason, everyone thinks posting a blog on your own website will magically increase your SEO presence and make your website stronger. Organic SEO is a lengthy process. Not because it’s complicated to implement (though it can be), but because tracking what works versus what doesn’t requires a least a few months’ worth of results to analyze. Plus, you need numbers! Traffic. It’s tough to track what’s working if you don’t have a consistent flow of online visitors leaving digital footprints for you to analyze.