Another tip is to make sure you do your research and examine which terms to target before you set out. Though you can simply just add a tracking code to your web pages for website analytics tools to start measuring your web stats, Google Analytics (and products similar to it) have website plugins and add-ons that tremendously expand the reporting capabilities. Researching your audience will give you an idea of their interests, wants, needs and how they respond to certain words and phrases. Doing A/B testing is a great way to see what title is most successful with your audience. If search engines don’t know your website/webpage exists, your chance of ranking isn’t just an improbability, it’s an impossibility.

The first indication should be navigation

Meaningful content that operates as part of a wider digital marketing strategy, with the likes of social media and blogging all playing a part, is now key. You should use large header tags and take advantage of CSS to alter these to fit into the style and colour scheme of your page. If you are using software such as Microsoft SharePoint Designer/FrontPage or Adobe Dreamweaver for example, these CSS details are created automatically for you. A solution which is also perhaps advisable is to make your CSS an external file; this way there is no need to repeat all of your CSS statements on each page, but simply just one. Internal linking is a really effective SEO technique – it helps search engines identify new pages on your website and indicates what your page is about. Press releases are some of the least-appreciated backlink tactics out there. Fortunately, you don’t need a Madison Avenue PR firm to reap the rewards from press releases. As long as you have something going on at your business (and why wouldn’t you?), you can easily spin that into a new press release.

Have you thought about optimizing your TF-IDF scores?

To keep search engines from ignoring your site, only use original content. Copying and pasting product descriptions from your merchant’s site may save you time, but it will also lower your site’s page ranking. To assure your page rank remains high, take the time to write your own content. If you don’t have time to write, hire a copywriter to create original content for you. Most people look at SEO the wrong way. They look at ways to do the least amount of work for the greatest initial return, when in fact, it's quite the opposite. Make sure that all of your web pages can be indexed by search engines - make sure that they all have at least one link from somewhere on your site. When you are creating text, keep in mind that web users want to get information quickly. So, express yourself in as much detail as necessary, but as succinctly as possible. For example, avoid long, nested phrases and break up your texts with short paragraphs, bullet points, headings, and images.

Hummingbird also impacts long-tailed search queries

In social search, content that has a social connection to you in some way is prioritized. A social connection could mean someone you are linked to via Facebook, Twitter, or any other major social network. Always remember, “Content is King”. Thereby, the content should be fresh, unique and relevant to what your website is about, and there should be no duplicate content. Search engines reward sites that are user friendly, which means they have high usability. Google favors sites that are not only rich in keywords, but also demonstrate user engagement. Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "Despite countless claims over the years that have proclaimed the death of link building it is still very much alive and kicking. Not only is it still alive but it remains one of the most important ranking factors and is in the top two factors in Google’s ranking algorithm. Over the years there have been many dubious link building practices such as link farming, buying links, comment linking on blogs and many other low effort practices."

Your content marketing campaign will fail unless you integrate SEO

SEO measures can take some time and effort. But what is the point in investing time and effort if you cannot see the fruits of your labor? Luckily, there are numerous metrics that you can check on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis in order to keep your SEO plan on track and to measure your success. Recognizing intent will allow you to improve keyword selection decisions and better serve your target audience. If you are working out an SEO strategy, you should split it into two parts: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to all the measures you can take effect on your own site. These measures make it easier for search engines to find your website, index it, and understand and classify your content. Offpage SEO covers issues which are external to your website and ensure an inflow of high-quality inbound links. Getting rankings is an output SEO firms can easily sell because they’re emotionally satisfying, but they’re worthless unless they generate leads or sales--the outcome you want.