If possible, secure your site’s connections with HTTPS. Encrypting interactions between the user and your website is a good practice for communication on the web. The days of stuffing keywords into bad content and having it rank are long gone. Now your content needs to focus on your target persona and your keywords need to flow within the content. Frequent link audits can save your site from the dangers of negative SEO. If you constantly monitor your links, it’s easier to spot a sudden change before it becomes uncontrollable. When optimizing your Google My Business page, remember to upload your business logo and photos of your business (staff, office building, etc.). For an online business with no physical location, you can hide your address, but be sure to fill in and validate every other piece of information entered.

Google wants to see that people are spending time on your website

Google is making a real push to get to grips with any tactic they see as manipulating the rankings in a way that’s against their guidelines – from keyword cramming to paying for sponsored posts. The main purpose of categories and tags are to help web visitors navigate your blogs quickly and easily, which in turn, help you get a better search ranking (if used properly). In a nutshell, categories are the table of contents for your blog, while tags are the index that helps a search engine to interpret your blog’s subject matter with ease. If someone hits their back button immediately after landing on a page, it tells Google in black-and-white: this is low quality page. That’s why Google uses “dwell time” to size up your content’s quality. Linking out is huge. Don't be a link hoard; you're going to create content, so use it to gain favor with other people. I'll go more into depth below with specific tactics on linking out, but in general, you only have something to gain when you’re linking out.

Quality, Plus Visibility

Modern commercial search engines rely on the science of information retrieval (IR). This science has existed since the middle of the twentieth century, when retrieval systems powered computers in libraries, research facilities, and government labs. Long form content is most valuable when it can serve as an extensive resource for readers on a specific topic. This includes long lists of tips, step-by-step guides, and collections of facts and statistics. If your website or webpage suddenly or gradually changes focus over time (say from a carpentry guide to a best practice SEO guide – sounds unlikely, but you never know), then anchor text pointing to you will likely change in line with the different topic. Google may then decide that your page has changed so much that the old anchor text is no longer fresh and devalue those older links. A negative SEO strategy involves crawling a website. This “forceful” crawling of the website puts strain on the web server, causing the website to slow down or even crash.

Google cares the most about editorial links

Boilerplate content is a fact on the web with many many sites, espesially sites that do rank well and are very credible. Google handles it, you don't really need to worry about the boilerplate content, Google can figure that part out. Google/Bing Webmaster Tools allows you to submit multiple pages at once by submitting your sitemap(s). Sitemaps also have the added benefit of supplying a few other useful pieces of information about your web pages to the search engines, It is important to have at least one keyword in your title. In addition, you should have your keywords in your meta descriptions, headers (h1 tags) and in the ALT descriptions and titles of images. According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "Avoid thin, insubstantial content, duplicate content and of course spammy-looking keyword stuffing techniques."

If I stop doing SEO will my rankings drop?

Picking the right keywords to optimize for is very important. Usually, it’s a good idea to pick mid-tail keywords, including the local area you are focusing on. While doing a backlink audit, analyzing toxic backlinks and removing them can be a lengthy and tedious process, it is worth doing if you really want to see your website perform well in the search results. There is little doubt that good search engine optimization (SEO) is important to ensure your site is properly indexed and ranked, but even the most optimized site is just a voice in the wind if you don’t have an audience. Becoming the authority in your area is quite possibly the No. 1 best avenue towards building that audience. There are various ranking factors that influence whether a website appears higher on the SERP based on the content relevance to the search term, or the quality of backlinks pointing to the page.