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. Google uses the date that a domain with …

It’s the number one thing you’ll be working on when you’re trying to improve mobile SEO: performance. In this case, performance almost entirely boils down to site speed. It’s a given: the faster your site is, the happier your users will be. A great way to …

Onpage optimization (AKA on-page SEO) refers to all measures that can be taken directly within the website in order to improve its position in the search rankings. Don’t stuff content with keywords – it’s just awful to read. Yes, you’ll probably boost rankings for a short time, until …

Rest assured that real SEO has nothing to do with keyword stuffing, keyword density, hacks, tricks or cunning techniques. If you hear any of these terms from your SEO advisor, run away from them as quickly as you can. Sitelinks can be a little bit of a double-edged sword: even …

When pursuing a link, which is more important, relevance or authority? Progressive SEO means technical, analytical and traditional marketing all rolled into one. The best ways to get do follow links is the honest way: creating awesome, original content that gets shared and linked to naturally. Other approaches include guest …

Remember the good old days of SEO, when all that you really needed to have “valid SEO content” was a certain number of words crossed with a certain percentage targeted keywords and punctuated by a few words linking to targeted pages? SEO is connected to strong sales funnels and often …

Earning a link from a high-quality, relevant website will not only help with your SEO but also with referral traffic, which can lead to more sales and brand exposure. A big part of Search Engine Optimization is optimizing your website to make it easier for visitors to navigate and use …

There are far more unique search queries than generic ones. If you added up the search engine traffic of the most popular keywords, the number would not even come close to the amount of unique, niche keywords. This concept is known as “long-tail theory”. Social media networks can help you …

Links from a diverse range of websites is good, many links from a single domain to your site (especially if it’s one of the very sites linking to you) can be seen as spammy. Examination of content keywords and present engine rank­ings of competitive websites to determine an …

Keyword research is something that needs focus and attention. It’s something you should take seriously. Without proper keyword research, you could well be optimizing your texts for the wrong search terms. Keywords are a critical component of the SEO strategy; optimizing your site for specific ones gives you the …

Whether or not a specific page ranks for a particular keyword depends largely on the quality of that individual page (content, user experience, number and quality of the backlinks, page load speed etc), and not the quality of your website as a whole. On-page SEO best practices allow us to …

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. Ensure the number of new site …

Optimizing your images gives your website an additional chance to be found via image search. Keyword research should be the starting point for any SEO campaign. Why? Because if you don’t know what people are actually searching for in your niche, you’ll be relying on luck—rather than …

Make sure at least one image file name includes your target keyword and that your target keyword is part of your image Alt Text. Make the content flow easily to keep people intrigued and reading. Spend some time to get to know the people who consistently share your content. Pull …

The ultimate goal of any marketer is to create a diverse range of high quality backlinks from various credible sources. But not all marketers tend to achieve this pinnacle. It takes time and patience and a lot of strategizing and in the end it is never that straight forward and …

As a general rule of thumb the more words in the query the easier it is to rank for that phrase. This is certainly not an absolute but has been the case for a majority of the terms I have worked with. *If you know of examples where this theory …

The macro approach to keyword research is necessary for content heavy websites (and optimizing for traffic), but not ideal when doing intent-focused keyword research, as would be the case for Ecommerce, software, or other scenarios where some keyword phrases are going to carry significantly more qualification. Humans are lazy creatures …

The cleaner the code on your website, the faster your pages will load and the actual html text on the page will be given greater emphasis. In other words, if you say “vacation rentals” five times in 100 lines of code, those phrases will stand out much more than if …

Search Engine Optimization should start with creating and uploading content. This can include a lot of things but the most basic piece of content that you will use is articles. You might think that it is pointless to start learning SEO tips and tricks as the algorithms of search engines …

Assessing which keywords to go after first is a crucial second step in your keyword research. This is difficult: not everyone is good at estimating which keywords their site will be able to rank for. Finding a good balance between the various “free” forms of building Back Links and the …

If you're a relatively new blog & would be willing to write a blog post for the sake of getting one solid, contextual link, then blog carnivals are a no brainer. Basically, blog carnivals are a blog community that writes about certain topics as a group. These posts then get linked …

When a search engine crawls your site, it moves slowly from one page to another by following the links on the page. As it does, it collects data about the content of your page. There are increasing opportunities to use schema markups, depending on your niche. There are numerous schema …

Don't feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service. Some companies claim to "guarantee" high ranking for your site in Google's search results. While legitimate consulting firms can improve your site's flow and content, others employ deceptive tactics in an attempt to fool search engines. Reaching an international audience …

Not all links are equal. The Google determines the quality of the links by looking at the quality of traffic that the specific links are driving to your website. It appears that when attempting to improve search engine ranking for a web-site, a position in the top six of the …

Quality will win over quantity every time and your results will not be nearly as fruitful if you’re putting out mediocre content. When deciding which keywords to go after, you could also use a tool, but simply googling your keywords will also give you insight into the difficulty to …

Your site navigation should be present and easily identifiable. Visitors should be able to navigate your site with ease, and ideally, be able to get to any page on your site with no more than 3 clicks. This provides a quick and easy user experience and ensures visitors don’t …

Just like they have for on-page SEO, technical aspects of SEO have changed as search engines have become more sophisticated. Never sell yourself short and never assume anyone knows your business better than you. One of the problems international businesses continuously need to address is identifying themselves as “local” in …

The reason social is such a natural extension of search is that it adds both relevancy and authority. Think about this: According to Nielsen research, 92% of consumers worldwide trust recommendations from friends and family more than any form of advertising. This is up from 74% in 2007. Having an …

One of the primary triggers in their algorithm is domain authority, which Google calculates based on a myriad of factors; in fact, the RankBrain system that Google uses employs more than 200 ranking signals. Just like you should interview others, seize opportunities to be interviewed, no matter how small the …

Setting up Google My Business is a must for your SEO gameplan. It is this that dictates whether your business will claim the space on the right hand side of the SERPs (the Knowledge Panel) when someone searches for your business by name. With SERP space at a premium, owning …

It makes sense to use the same keywords in titles and headlines, simply because a single page should always define it's topic as exactly as possible. This means there will always be only two or three main keywords any given page will need to be optimized for. Is your product …

Unlike some aspects of the mysterious Quality Score “secret sauce,” we know that Google takes landing page relevance into account when calculating Quality Score Google has been focused on semantic search and now uses something called Latent-Semantic Indexing (LSI) in its core Hummingbird engine. Domain authority is a score (on …

One of the best ways to start earning links is by creating something of use or interest to your audience. We’ve all seen them – the pieces of content that educate or entertain us, without being the core product of a website. As you may well know, Google has altered …

The permalink is the full URL you see – and use – for any given post, page or other pieces of content on your site. It’s a permanent link, hence the name permalink. f you are familiar with Google’s algorithm, you are aware that it is predicated based off of …

Today, due to the way backlinks are evaluated based on different industry-related ranking factors, it is less quantity focused and more about the quality of sites from which the links are coming. The bottom line is that if you’re focusing on a small group of generic keywords, you’re …

Building a strong site architecture and providing clear navigation will help search engines index your site quickly and easily. This will also, more importantly, provide visitors with a good experience of using your site and encourage repeat visits. Make sure at least one image file name includes your target keyword …

Measure and monitor what is working and update your strategy on the fly. Although Google Plus might be one of the less popular social networks out there, it’s still part of the Google Suite of applications and does play a part in boosting your site’s search visibility. The …

Whenever I speak to people about SEO, the number one question that I get asked is, “What’s the most important factor to rank number one in Google?” While building a better search engine optimization strategy, having a description tag that is efficient is a good way to bring searchers …

Keywords should appear in important on-page elements like the page title, heading, image alt text, and naturally throughout the page copy, but you should still be sure to craft each of these items for humans, not search engines There are few things more frustrating and downright annoying than investing a …

Have you ever wondered why Google.com delivers different results for a user in the US than for a user in Germany? Google, now more than ever, don't just want more content, they want content that they feel is quality. Standard engagement behaviours on SERP results, such as click-throughs and …