If the competition in your niche is high, you’ll have a hard time ranking on competitive head terms. If you have little competition, you’ll even be able to rank for head terms. It sounds so very easy! On average, the higher up page 1 the result is, the greater the number of linking domains that the webpage has. Getting high-quality links from outside websites is key — especially if you can find a way to get .edu links. Google sees inbound links coming from websites ending in .edu as especially trustworthy. Google and other search engines also use the text of the URL of the page to determine the content of the web page. You should use your keyword or phrase in the URL of the web page - either the folder/directory structure or the HTML file/page name itself.

User-generated content + communities

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. On the web, sole traders can in theory compete with the corporate big boys, so being able to be found – and found easily – among those searches is essential for any firm If you have large sections of duplicate text page-to-page – that is a problem that should be targeted and removed. Link building has no single technical definition. If you ask me, I would say link building is doing your best to get high quality websites to link to you. However, a more standardized definition would go like this: Link Building involves acquiring hyperlinks from reputed and high quality websites.

Is the content of each page relevant to that SEO term?

The problem is, not all backlinks are the same. A large and authoritative site in your niche may be more powerful than many general blogs with little or spammy backlinks. It’s important not to waste your time creating content for sites that won’t help you rank, but how do you determine if a site is worth getting a link from? By now, you should be convinced that you want to be on the top of the SERPs. It never hurts to be #1 in the natural search results Human users are already intrigued by your title; all that’s left to do is entice them to clickthrough with your meta description. A meta description is information, more in depth than your title, that will let users know what to expect when they visit your page. Think of SEO as one small part of a much more cohesive marketing strategy.

SEO has truly come into its own as a marketing channel

Based on some online surveys, SEO is one of the most significant marketing activity for modern marketers and companies are hugely investing in SEO. Many small business owners balk at video marketing because they think that their business isn’t “video worthy”. But if lawyers and instant coffee brands can have a YouTube channel there’s no reason you can’t either. Even better than the traffic you get from video websites are the high-quality backlinks from high PageRank authority websites. If you are focused on a local market, it is also important to get connected with local businesses and organizations. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "You can also build a reasonable idea of how many links you need, and how authoritative, in order to compete. To check out your competitors’ links, you can search for their most popular URLs with the link: command in Google. If you want to go further, use one of the many backlink tools to search for the most influential links – a good starting point is Open Link Profiler which gives you a lot of data for free."

Take some action to bolster your SEO efforts

More and more we are seeing the use of keyword clustering from sites that are making it beyond the scope of mediocre search results and traffic margins. As Google has become quicker in catching webmasters who use unethical SEO practices and has implemented harsher punishments for offenders (lower rankings or banning of websites, etc.). Some companies desperate for improved search rankings have found ways to hack into the websites of competitors and implement some nasty strategies on those sites. Mobile is becoming more popular every year. Your website should be designed with your visitor in mind. Nobody wants to wait a long time for a page to load, and slow site speeds will tempt visitors to visit a competitor’s page.