Maintaining a marketing strategy that complements your SEO is key in 2017, if you have a great product, get it out there and get it seen by potential customers. There has been debate on how much of your yearly budget you should be spending on marketing and the answer is completely dependent on the company. In the past, creating keyword rich anchor text used to be considered an effective strategy as long as they were on relevant sites. However, those days are long gone! Now, any keyword rich anchor text that you create on your own goes against Google’s guidelines. People spend very little time engaging with content. Community hijacking involves finding online communities that are made up of your target market, or people that can reach your target market so that you can build a relationship with them and get them to promote your content/brand/product(s).

Make sure your site is optimized for mobile

If you're not adding value, then the customer simply won't ascend and you won't grow your business (fast or slow). That's what it takes. Setting up Google My Business is a must for your SEO gameplan. It is this that dictates whether your business will claim the space on the right hand side of the SERPs (the Knowledge Panel) when someone searches for your business by name. With SERP space at a premium, owning this piece of real estate when someone searches for your brand is a must. The more a site is appealing to humans, the more search engine like it. Websites with straightforward navigation tend to win over visitors than those with a messy URL structure and content organization. The closer to the start of the title tag any given keyword is, the more likely it will be to rank for that keyword based query.

Optimize page titles

Building a strong site architecture and providing clear navigation will help search engines index your site quickly and easily. This will also, more importantly, provide visitors with a good experience of using your site and encourage repeat visits. Voice search is picking up steam. You can now use your voice to search the web, play music, navigate home, order sushi or get the latest football results. To offer the best possible results, search engines must attempt to discover all the public pages on the World Wide Web and then present the ones that best match up with the user’s search query. You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search results. If you do want to prevent search engines from crawling your pages, Google Webmaster Tools has a friendly robots.txt generator to help you create this file.

Understanding the rationale behind SEO

If you have covered the technical issues of a new website, you’ll have properly prepared your site for all the great content you’ll be adding. Industry-relevant links are often the easiest links for small business owners to acquire. Many of them simply involve asking your existing contacts at companies or organizations with whom you do business. One of the recommendations I frequently give as an SEO consultant is to optimize your images. A lot of websites have images that are relatively large, which take a lot of time to load. Resizing your images can speed up the loading time. According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "If Google decides a site no longer adheres to its quality guidelines, they may apply a site-wide penalty pushing the results down for every page. The more infractions, and the greater the seriousness of the infractions, the bigger the penalty and the further the site will drop."

Businesses rely on their websites so it’s vital to get SEO right

Google counts links from other websites as votes. So, when they’re presented with two (or more) pages on the same topic, the page with the most links (i.e. votes) will usually rank higher than the page(s) with fewer links. 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. Once you’ve discovered your evangelists, think about ways to nurture and encourage them. At the simplest (and possibly most meaningful) level, find a way to thank them for spreading the word about your company. Make sure content is not buried inside rich media (Adobe Flash Player, JavaScript, Ajax) and verify that rich media doesn't hide links from crawlers.