Join popular online forums and post valuable comments and discussions with links back to your site. This can get others to do the same if they like what they see. Although SEO marketing tactics take a long time to show impact and ranking against high-power competitors isn’t an easy task, SEO should be a critical part of any small business’ long-term growth marketing plan. If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results. Effective content curation, better accessibility practices and proper information architecture are all key components for strong SEO.

Use Responsive Design

One of two things can happen when you begin an SEO campaign, you can jump in blind and guess your way through the process or you can create a partnership with a company that wants to work alongside you to improve your SEO rankings. So one of the best long-term marketing tactics is regularly publishing content on your site. Develop an editorial calendar and create a plan to consistently publish new evergreen content if you want to create long-term value for your website. Long-form content is a magnet for long tail searches. The more searchers and visitors you attract, the more you can ‘satisfy’ and the better chance you can rank higher in the long run. A very common approach for cross linking is by doing footer/sidebar links and content deep linking. For search engines, it gets really easy to rank, when you have links to your webpage containing relevant keywords from other domain names.

Optimize your content around a topic, not around a single keyword

Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (e.g. root page -> related topic listing -> specific topic)? Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages? Quality will win over quantity every time and your results will not be nearly as fruitful if you’re putting out mediocre content. When Google returns its search results, it produce two types of results: organic results and paid results. Organic search results most closely match the user’s search query based on relevance as deciphered by Google’s search algorithm. Also known as natural search results, ranking well in organic results for relevant and valuable search terms is the goal of SEO. When it comes to getting visitors to your site, you want to grow your audience and also keep them coming back.

SEO is not about stuffing a paragraph full of links and keywords

After conducting some keyword research around those phrases, settle on the ones that have a good search volume and are as specific as possible. The more specific a key phrase, the more likely a customer is to convert as they are able to find exactly what they have been searching for on your website. It is important to remember though that organic link building does not happen overnight. You have to build a perceptive strategy to generate the highest quality of content and then promote it amongst the influencers of your market to gain organic links. Links pointing to your site help Google discover new pages on your site. It also, traditionally, is regarded as a signal of popularity. The site linking to your content is essentially telling Google they trust your content. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "When dealing with search engines, the term ‘relevance‘ describes the extent to which the content of a website corresponds to the search term used."

Is there a further shift towards user focussed factors?

Every business needs a marketing strategy and so does a website. The best strategy to market any website is through SEO management. Smart content is about taking the financial investment that companies make in their content development and channeling it towards a more effective and data-driven strategy. SEO is a long-term commitment that offers long-term results. Know that good SEO isn’t going to take a few days and you won’t see huge results in weeks. SEO takes months, but the benefits last for years. There are a number of ways to get relative monthly search volume, but what remains the easiest is using Google keyword planner (the replacement for the now deprecated keyword tool).