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Google Algorithms Target Low-Quality Content

Whenever I speak to people about SEO, the number one question that I get asked is, “What’s the most important factor to rank number one in Google?” How does a new website start ranking? Does it just magically appear in Google after you’ve launched it? What things do you have to do to start ranking in Google and get traffic from the search engines? 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. Sometimes you might spot a particularly juicy keyword when conducting your research. But just because a keyword has high volume, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a good one to rank for.

Write Good Title Tags

The search industry is constantly innovating, and it might seem overwhelming for marketers with limited time and resources to try and keep on top of developments. No matter what niche your website is in, when you start writing an article, always provide helpful and actionable guidance. If you are giving the users the information they want, your content can be as long as you need. The mechanism of a backlink is essentially a vote from another website to yours - a vote that says that your website is authoritative enough or trusted enough to link to. Pick a list of words relevant to your business. Then create separate lists of these keywords for each country. Focus on “long-tail keywords” -- keywords that are very specific to your business and the products/services you offer. For example: marketing is a broad keyword that will be hard to get traffic for, and inbound marketing software is a long-tail keyword with less competition that will be easier to get traffic for.

Google Algorithms Target Low-Quality Content

Google has reduced the importance of keyword phrases and now places more importance on a variety of elements, appropriately called “on-page factors.” Make sure your backlinks appear to be natural. Don’t ask webmasters to link back to your pages with a specific anchor text since this can haphazardly result in a pattern that may get noticed by search engines and cause you to get a linking penalty. In order to rank highly in SERPs, the search engines must see your website’s content as being trustworthy. There is significant traffic to be gained by optimizing for video search engines and participating in them. Once again, these are binary files and the search engine cannot easily tell what is inside them

Defining Your Site’s Audience

Many marketers are so focused on building out site hierarchy, wireframing and design of the site that they lose site of content development. SEO is a huge part of content development, but when content becomes an afterthought during web redesign, and the focus is on getting the new site live ASAP, often times marketers will put the content together without deliberate thought to keyword inclusion and smart SEO content strategies. By limiting your SEO efforts to Google, you might be missing out on some great opportunities for small business growth. Imagine what a one-second increase in website load time could do for Amazon? More importantly, what could it do for you? According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "For a long time Google looked at the name of a particular website and the queries that were entered and might rank that site higher if the domain name had some match with the query."

Focus on ‘Things’, Not ‘Strings’

At the end of the day, consumers want to feel like they’re always interacting with something natural and real. If you find that your backlinks are mainly coming from a small pool of domains, look at a way to diversify your backlink strategy to get links from a greater variety of domains. When you're ready to scale your strategy, consider hiring a professional SEO agency or a highly skilled independent contractor. Strive to incorporate a small handful of links to authoritative sources throughout your copy. This communicates to your readers (and to Google’s algorithms) that your content, while unique, gives credit where it’s due.