Go through all your pages and look at your titles. Are you making the most of your keywords? And are they as interesting as possible (and suitable)? Each page needs a unique title tag, and tags should be 65 characters or less in length. Brand mentions and co-citations are also very important to Google, in determining the quality and usefulness of a particular web page. If search engines don’t know your website/webpage exists, your chance of ranking isn’t just an improbability, it’s an impossibility. The more a site is appealing to humans, the more search engine like it. Websites with straightforward navigation tend to win over visitors than those with a messy URL structure and content organization.

Do you understand the demographics of social media across networks?

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. In short, Google is looking for signs of quality, relevance and great design. At the end of the day, Google does not care about you as a content creator. You are not Google’s customer! Google’s customer is the end user who searches for a keyphrase because they want to get relevant information or find the answer to a question. If you are designing your website yourself and mess up the coding in your website, Google spiders won’t be able to read your site efficiently and this can hurt your rankings significantly. 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 it on social media to widen your reach there, too.

Content rated as topically relevant significantly outperforms content that doesn't cover a topic in-depth

Many webmasters see Panda as a type of Google penalty—but it's not, really. Panda is a collection of measurements Google is taking of your web pages to try and give your pages a rating on how happy users are likely to be with those pages. When they are indexing websites, the search engines’ bots scan every one of a site’s URLs and look for the starting points of the topics that are covered. They also browse the HTML code for metadata such as particular tags or markups, so that they can determine the relevance of individual pages to particular subjects. Certain words present an ongoing challenge for the search engines. One of the greatest challenges comes in the form of disambiguation. The days of buying, selling, and trading links for rankings is long gone…and if you try to bring it back, you will be long gone as well.

Optimizing your website for both Google and web users

For those who can’t find any good place to apply a keyword or phrase, using them in the links built to other websites will help them to stand out for readers. Whether you are a local business or have multiple bricks and mortar stores, you are likely to get most of your custom from your local area. This being the case, having good search visibility for your target locale is essential. You should see improvements in website traffic, a key indicator of progress for your keywords. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Let’s begin with something practical – think of all the important topics our website is about. Don’t try and come up with every keyword variation, but do group your ideas in topic buckets – each bucket covering a page or closely related set of pages."

Why won’t people engage with my content?

Your content can target any audience, but if it doesn’t sufficiently deliver the information that audience is seeking, you’re out of luck. Make sure you optimize your content with the right key term. This way, Google spider can index and serve your content to targeted search users. With the many different resources available for finding keywords people are actually using in their searches, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get through this stage of Search Engine Optimization successfully. Click through rate is a good indicator of whether you’re attracting the right or wrong website visitors and if your website content is what your website visitors are looking for. If you’re attracting the wrong audience or your webpage content isn’t interesting, relevant or useful to the audience, your CTR will be low.