The next step is often forgotten

To understand the challenge you face to rank well in your niche, or to steal ideas on how to get started, turn to your competitors. By taking a deep look at the links they’ve earned, and how they got them, you’ll uncover tactics you can replicate, plus get inspiration for your own fresh ideas. Set up a Google Alert for your company name. Any time your business is mentioned across the web, contact the webmaster, thank them, and ask them nicely to include a link. Which articles and posts get the most clicks? Not surprisingly, posts containing countdowns and Top 10 lists are heavily clicked. Not only do they get an enormous wave of traffic when first launched, but they’ll continue to attract traffic for months and even years later. Google Panda and Penguin stopped keyword stuffing in its tracks making it not just not ideal but counter productive.

Competitor Link Analysis for SEO

A picture can be worth a thousand words, they say. Well, when it comes to online marketing, a single image can be worth a thousand links! When your schedule is manic and you just haven’t got the time to create new material, re-purposing existing content is the ultimate time-saving strategy. And although it may seem like the lazy option, it’s actually a really effective aspect of content marketing. Google/Bing Webmaster Tools allows you to submit multiple pages at once by submitting your sitemap(s). Sitemaps also have the added benefit of supplying a few other useful pieces of information about your web pages to the search engines, SEO works by modifying elements on a website like the meta title and meta description of a page to ‘optimize’ it to get the most possible traffic. ‘Keyword targeting’ can determine which words you should be aiming for, and getting links from other high authority sites and creating relevant content on your web page and via articles on your site can shift your website up in search rankings over time.

Why should you invest time, effort, and resources on SEO?

All backlinks are not created equal - make sure your websites inbound links are from trusted, relevant sources and avoid junk or spam citations. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites, while spammy sites receive very few links from trusted sources. Apart from knowing which search terms people use, you need to know whether or not your idea for your post or page fits the desires and expectations of the people who use the search terms. The best way to find out whether or not your content fits these desires is to Google your proposed (sets of) keywords yourself. Google learned that when people search for the term “SEO,” they were more likely to click on information over a list of services. So, eventually, the algorithm changed to incorporate this behavior, and now it delivers the types of results it believes the keyword is really asking for.

Be authentic

Alt attributes are the text alternatives to your image which will appear if your image fails to load, or if the user is accessing your site with an assistive device such as a screenreader. Because web crawlers don’t have eyes, they’re also what search engines “see” instead of an image, making them important for both accessibility and SEO. Google normally takes into account bounce rate and the time spent on a site as ranking factors. If visitors are bouncing away due to navigation confusion and poor content structure, you can be sure that the search bots are too. Build links as if Google didn’t even exist – links that will bring you customers in addition to rankings. According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "Syndication takes the credibility of the site you’re syndicating it too and transfers all the link juice and credibility (as well as social proof) over to your website. Syndication is a great way as well to gain a lot more visibility for the same amount of work!"