Know your audience - surveys and your analytics software can help you get a better picture of your typical visitor or client. Consider developing marketing personas, or characters that represent your ideal site visitors and customers. Then think about what kinds of content those personas would be looking for. People become …

Over the last decade, I've had lots of success with SEO on my website and that of my clients. In all cases, I did the right things and I stayed clear away from tactics that offered quick returns or were geared towards manipulating Google. All backlinks are not created equal …

My advice would be never to host more than 10 sites with the same hosting provider and not to worry too much about different C Blocks. If you do ever suffer a penalty, you may find that more than one of your sites is affected ("tarred with the same brush …

Your title should always tie directly to your content. If it doesn't, the visitor is more likely to bounce, sending Google a signal that your content didn't serve their search interest. As a result, Google will drop your position in the SERPs like a hot potato. With content being king …

Getting featured in this part of SERP will help attract clicks and, ultimately, more visitors to your page. This can prove to be very discouraging and difficult to deal with, but it's worth it in the long-run. External optimization involves optimizing your content not only for search engines, but for …

Eliminate keywords with 8,000 or more searches per month. The keyword tag, if used, should include your main keywords, those you've chosen as the main focus of your website, as well as those associated with the theme of your web page. Conversely, when the image of an organization or …

Google makes it really hard. An authority website doesn't necessarily have to be one of the usual big publishers. If you're a niche website or blog with high quality, relevant content, you can be as highly regarded as any other source. For those SEO agencies and professionals who have been …

Blogging is one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to improve search rankings. Not only does a blog easily enable you to add fresh, relevant content to a site that might otherwise remain static, but it also keeps your web visitors coming back to your site for more. We …

Each blog post also contains a keyword-rich subdomain with the date and title. Start as you mean to go on: titles are the best places to get started with SEO. Regardless of what the search engines think, a snappy, relevant title will help attract readers on any platform. How you've …

Many e-commerce website designers believe that placing a greater number of products on a page means that individuals will be more likely to find something of interest. Most major forms of advertising contain visual and verbal or written elements. Some business owners are content with learning about and implementing a …

From Google's point of view, it is not advisable to place the actual content of the page below the fold. Google updates. Advertisers often use visual imagery in international marketing. Data mining can be used by companies to build profiles of its best customers.

Paid Ads (or Links)

In the past, some marketing experts believed that any type of sales promotion, whether consumer or trade, eroded brand equity by shifting the focus to price. Researching the top-performing websites for final selection of your keyword phrase is the most important step in keyword selection and it takes a little …

You're going to always have outliers, observations that don't fit into the puzzle. Many agency professionals better understand consumers and trends because they work with a number of clients over an array of products. There is no minimum amount of words or text to rank in Google. Keyword research is …

A strong name featuring a well-designed logo helps consumers remember brands and company messages. Don't be scared by the acronym SEO, it just allows sites like Google to read your website and rate you in terms of how relevant you are to the users search terms. Evergreen content is quality …

A brand's position is never completely fixed. Get specific by taking a structured approach. It's not enough to focus on the right keyword-you need to make sure that you're communicating the 'right' information to Google in a structured way. Social shares are important because they help your blog post get …

This can be by permanently having it placed in one position; most useful places are either on the web page's header or footer. A www (www.yoursite.com) version and non-www (http://yoursite.com) version of your homepage/website. When the analysis is complete, target markets may be selected in …

A sitemap is another place to add in more internal links. A sitemap is a central location with links to all your pages. Backlinks are the foundation of Google's algorithm for determining a site's page rank. If you're goal for a guest post is to receive a backlink in return …

For many businesses the goal is to get their business to position number 1 on Google, but did you know that there's a new top spot on Google called position zero. You've probably noticed these results but maybe not understood them properly. Position zero is all about using featured snippets …

Google insists that you must also work on the website's authority to drive higher levels of trust. Although many websites now use navigation starting at the top of the browser page, there are still a number of websites that still have a left-hand column that contains navigation links. An increase …

Where appropriate, you should add localization. This is extremely important to businesses who offer products and services to a specific geographic region. 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 …

Web users, just like television viewers, are becoming immune to advertisements. How do you stand out in all of the clutter? Windows filenames are case-insensitive, whereas Linux filenames are case-sensitive. Less than 10% of the users in the most active internet countries have broadband. The faster your website loads, the …

CSS files should be free from syntax errors. Finding online growth means unearthing low-cost ways to grow by exploiting an opening somewhere. If you imagine that building an optimized site is like cooking a meal, then keywords are the essential ingredients. Panda has ensured that publishing poor quality content to …

While you should not hide your heading tag in an image, you should still give search engines more opportunities to link to your website by adding keywords in the image alt text and file name. Can your title tag be improved to be more user-friendly? Evergreen content must hold its …

You can also check Google Webmaster Tool to see if there are any reported duplicate title tags issues. What are your general and specific expectations? If you're struggling to rank #1 for your brand name among other websites with a similar or the same name, a rebrand to a more …

You can slide in some first person (our or we, especially in sentences like For example, a hack practice could be paying money for cheap traffic and then claiming it's organic or from another less dubious traffic source. This may lead to common preferences for music, foods, and other products …

If you're using top navigation, simply let Google complete its crawl. The world of search marketing (SEM) has evolved a lot in the years since its outset. We all started out as novices at one point; if you encounter one, be encouraging! Social media and the internet provide consumers with …

At best they will put you on top for a month and at worse they can cause irreversible damage to your domain and company. While most of the links to your site will be gained gradually, as people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it …

In this chapter we're setting the stage for how to get creatively motivated to increase traffic and learn how to kite trends. Now, you don't want to go crazy, but a few smart internal links with appropriate anchor text can get you very far. Another tip: Never link back to …

You need to get all sorts of links - not just comments, or profiles, or blog posts. A typical site will get links from all over the place and with all different anchors. You need to follow that strategy too (especially true after the Penguin and Panda updates). Instagram does not …