Actively seeking links can and should penalize your website

Create a website that people love! Search engines were created to measure different signals across the Web so they could find out which websites people like most. Play right into their hands by making those signals real and not artificial! The job of an SEO specialist doesn’t stop with a couple of website tweaks and a few links scattered around the internet. Instead, the specialist has to be on the ball, constantly looking for trends like those noted above and finding new ways to maximize website traffic. When the damage is done, it can be very hard to get back onto Google’s good side. In fact, that's often impossible. The direction that you take to improve the visibility of your site on the web should be decided upon by analysing the current state of your website, the audience you are targeting, your business objectives and any previous SEO work that has been carried out.

Social media signals have always invited contradicting opinions

Speed is a ranking factor for desktop and a very important usability factor for mobile. Google is very serious about page loading times on mobile and that’s why they have introduced and pushing for the implementation of accelerated mobile pages. Although Google hasn’t officially declared it, there is evidence to suggest that this search engine giant does reward sites with strong user engagement with higher page ranking. Anchor text to specific webpages on your site should be descriptive (but concise) as possible in order to benefit from the link. If Google decides a site no longer adheres to its quality guidelines, they may apply a site-wide penalty pushing the results down for every page. The more infractions, and the greater the seriousness of the infractions, the bigger the penalty and the further the site will drop.

Learn more about Page speed and SEO

Because there has been quite some news about Google’s Penguin update and before that its Panda update, people are blaming those. Instead of creating content, a lot of websites should be focused on cleaning content. Search engines drive dramatic quantities of focused traffic, comprising people intent on accomplishing their research and purchasing goals. While the page meta data (page description and keywords) are not nearly as important as they used to be, they still count. Take advantage of them by putting your keyword or phrase there.

Use Social Sharing Buttons

Long Tail SEO is a really useful technique to generate organic search traffic for your website. HTTPS stands for ‘Secure’. It means all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted. Switching to HTTPS will help you stay in Google’s good books. Why is that? Well HTTPS is a far more secure system for your website to operate. It goes without saying that search engines will have a preference for trusted websites. So, in terms of your overall SEO strategy HTTPS over HTTP is a big yes seeing as though 1 in 4 visitors would abandon a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. 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 to from an issue, kind of like a magazine. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "It has been commonly known that having multiple domains linked to one website, often improve rankings. However, although this may be true, if you plan to register multiple domain names, you should keep them as relevant to your main keywords as possible, even if you put hyphens between the keywords. This means that your website address is more likely to appear higher up the search engine rankings."