As Google continues its journey for the perfect user experience on their own site, you have to strive to keep up. Keyword relevancy and placement is far more important than frequency. Your keyword or key phrase should appear in the first 100 words of your page, if not the first sentence. Most SEO firms will tell claim it takes 4 to 6 months to start seeing results. It varies wildly but that’s generally in the ballpark for most projects. Note that SEO results are cumulative & escalate over time. If you’re getting positive results after 6 months these will compound after 12 months & re-compound thereafter. The most profitable relationships I’ve entered into with businesses have lasted for over 5 years during which time their fortunes have literally exploded. We all know that getting backlinks (a.k.a. inbound links) from trusted websites is a great way to give your website’s search rankings a boost. However, there’s also a dark side to backlinks. If Google suspects that there are spammy, low-quality sites linking to your site, your rankings could suffer. This is known as “negative SEO”. (In some cases, spammers will purposely direct lots of low-quality links to your site in order to cause negative SEO.)

Focus on topic depth vs. backlinks

Link building helps your content reach a broader audience, increasing both your site’s visibility and its authority. Moreover, it can grow your search traffic, as the number of unique domains linking to your site helps search engines understand whether your content is informative enough to rank higher in the SERP. PageSpeed Insights is a powerful tool to analyze the performance of your mobile site. It’s easy to use and gives you loads of insights into the loading speed of your site. Put in your URL and Insights will give you two scores: one for mobile and one for the desktop. Although you may outsource some of the work, SEO is still your primary job as a site owner. This means you will have to oversee the process, as tedious as it may seem at times. You cannot let the little details slip by you. One wrong keyword or a broken link today could lead to a poorly ranked site tomorrow. So be sure to stay on top of things and micromanage your site. Make sure you add responsive mobile URLs to your sitemap. Mobile friendly pages tend to rank higher for mobile search results, therefore inform the Search Engines which pages on your website is mobile friendly.

What are your most popular pages/items about?

Looking at a website’s backlink profile can tell you a lot about their marketing activities and help you to understand why, where, and how they rank. The authority of the website or webpage linking to your site is also key. A few high authority links are far more valuable then many from low quality sites. Expanding your online operation into a new market? Want to ensure that your website is ready for a different language and/or region? You will need to ensure that your website is well optimised for International SEO. At the heart of your local SEO campaign will be building the number of listings you have. In other words, the amount of places you can add your business, and get a citation. Often it is assumed that only business directories count, but actually there are number of ways to expand your portfolio.

Simply put, people don’t know what they don’t know

Creating a plan of works for improving your search engine rankings or identifying why a website isn’t ranking well isn’t always straight forwards. One of the main reasons a business professional might reject investing in SEO is because it seems to be highly dependent on the behavior of a search engine; they have no control over Search engines don’t like familiar or generic content. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Whether it's your friends, relatives, employees, colleagues, business partners, clients, or anyone else, ask them for a link. Someone you know has a website or blog, so take advantage"

Understanding the rationale behind search marketing

Off-page SEO factors are as important as on-page SEO factors. To have a successful SEO optimisation, both should be done. Earlier it was still easy to rank by building spammy links but, after the penguin and panda updates, its much difficult. Stay on top of relevant trends, create “how-to” blog posts, and frequently update older content to make sure you’re continuing to serve your audience with useful and timely information even after it’s initially published. Panda has ensured that publishing poor quality content to earn rankings simply isn't effective anymore. And Penguin ensures that traditional link building can be risky and dangerous to search engine visibility. Caffeine's Freshness update has obfuscated large swaths of keyword data used to measure SEO success. The best practice for internal linking is to think primarily about the user experience. Organically link to assets in a way that streamlines the buyer’s journey.