Today, semantic search has evolved even more, and search engines are better than ever at understanding query context and the relationships between words. Since the ascent of Google as the world’s #1 search engine, links have been the primary concern of most SEO practitioners. Placing ads in front of potential customers has traditionally been one of the easiest ways to introduce your product to the world, but things have changed a lot over the years. While traditional advertisements still have their place, companies no longer have to rely on a chance encounter to get their products in front of their customers. While meta descriptions are not strictly a ranking signal, a good meta description can vastly improve click-through rate, so make sure you use it wisely!

Get involved in the human element of web data

If you maintain a blog, of course you want the traffic to your blog to grow. But what if it doesn’t? What if the traffic to your blog is (slightly) decreasing? What do you do? Link building has always been an important aspect of local SEO. It is only through links that search engines crawl your website. Getting links from authoritative domains and local resources (local newspapers, publications, magazines etc) would work wonders for your business. If your niche is very competitive, you probably shouldn’t go after the most competitive head terms. It will be really hard to rank for those. Select the best related keywords and start a list. Words with low competition will catch your eye as opportunities. Those are keywords people are searching for, but there isn’t a hefty amount of content available to answer their questions.

Most sites do not need to worry about Penguin unless they have done some sketchy link building in the past

By starting a blog — or taking an existing blog up a notch — you can increase your influence and establish stronger relationships with potential and current customers. With responsive design, the only thing that changes across devices is the styling (which is controlled by CSS). This configuration makes it easier for Google to crawl your pages and retrieve your content. To quote Google, “This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh. If possible, choose a domain name which includes your local area, and structure URLs to include relevant geographical terms where possible. Create content which talks about your local area, but be sure to make it engaging and relevant to provide a good user experience. Include your business NAP (name, address and phone number) on every page of your website – not just your home page or contact page. As Google continues to improve its ability to deliver hyper-local results, it is critically important to have complete and accurate data in one’s Google My Business profile.

What search engines cannot see

It’s clear that there is a link between the websites which rank highly for a certain keyword and whether or not that keyword appears in its URL. However, this is unlikely to be the only factor that determines whether or not a site can rank well. The mobile version of your website is equally important, if not more important than the desktop version. Mobile-first, they say. Fact is, that your website probably has as many mobile visitors as it has desktop visitors, of course depending on the type of site you have It’s better to have a custom 404 error code page than to have an empty page — it doesn’t send a good message to search engines or site visitors. Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "Bad content truly can do long-lasting damage to your website, brand and business."

Use your outreach skills

Really good SEO is a process and it requires a detailed and well thought out plan. You cannot expect to execute quality SEO without listing out what you’re going to do, documenting yourself along the way, and executing step by step. The goal of negative SEO is to lower the rankings of competitor websites. This, they believe, will subsequently elevates their own rankings once the competition is out of the way. Make sure at least one image file name includes your target keyword and that your target keyword is part of your image Alt Text. The quality and quantity of links you have pointing to your site has a direct bearing on how highly it ranks in organic search results.