As mentioned earlier, Google and its algorithm evolve continuously. Its objective as of now is to understand the user’s intention: what they expect, what they are searching for and more specifically, what search results are going to best help in answering their query.
Aside from that, for a rather large amount of queries, Google provides rich results which include the best answer on top of search results.

Never expect that your website will shoot to the top of the first page of results by just coming up with a content that focuses on your keyword. Experts suggest that it is about time to stop looking at your keywords and start looking at the queries.

To keep things simple, you have to consider exactly what your users are searching for instead of just coming up with various ways that users phrase their search queries.

The moment you join the link building industry, you have to brace yourself to be greeted by tons of quick offers and services from SEO companies promising to make you reach the top of search results using their super fast services exclusively made for you.

Before you even accept such service, it is important to keep in mind that there is definitely no shortcut in clean SEO or SEO with no penalization from the search engines. You need to be clever and work hard in order to survive in this cut throat competition. But, when you speak of, be natural, it means that you must give attention to your link building campaigns then provide proper value to both do-follow and no-follow links.

Most beginners assume that do follow link backs are the only means to get yourself on top of search results but this is not really true. If you just make do follow links to your sites, search engine bots will be able to track you right away and get you listed as link hungry, which means that you might be kicked out of search engines.

You will also need no-follow links to your site since this will give you authority in the eyes of search engines. This will show that you are not hungry for do follow links just to rank higher and doesn’t give value to the back links.

You are probably aware that Google now actively watches your links and penalizes your site on SEO so you have to know at which point Google will penalize your site. Most people only work on the factor that more back links to your site can make your site shoot to the top of results and with no constant speed, you generate quick back links to your sites, alerting Google bots that some sketching is happening under the webmaster hood and your site easily moves into their consideration list.

This problem can be easily overcome through making a constant speed in the generation of back links to your site. If you make 10 back links to your site in one day, then, you have to continue the same routine to a minimum of 30 days since this will not generate or send false signals to Google bots.

Be careful to not overload your content with keywords. Keyword stuffing is one of those broadly used SEO strategies and techniques but that can hurt you more than helps you. It’s been said that your keywords should represent 2% of your content. In fact, at Growth Hackers, we think it’s even too much. Having a ratio keywords/number of words of 1% is already good.

Not too long ago, Google announced that they will use site speed as a ranking factor and from then on, Google consistently emphasized the essence of site speed.

They initially launched their PageSpeed tool to help the developers in improving site performance before it was followed by Accelerated Mobile pages Project for boosting speed on mobile websites. They also launched a tool referred to as Think with Google which helps gauge the responsiveness of the site, where speed is included as a parameter.

It is clear that Google wants your site to have a faster load time than what it has right now. But, how fast should it be? Sadly, site speed’s exact definition is open to speculation. Based on surveys conducted, almost half of web users expect a website to load in a matter of 2 seconds or even less. When the site fails to launch within 3 seconds, there is a great chance that users will abandon it.

You have to work on the speed of your site and not just work your way up to reach high rankings in Google but also to boost your conversions. For example, a certain survey discovered that almost 79 percent of online shoppers who have difficulties with site performance never go back to the site to shop ever again.

If your website is slow, you have very little chance to be ranked on the 1st page of Google. Speeding up your website is one of those very effective SEO strategies and techniques that won’t take you much time. So, start optimizing your image, implementing cache and more today!

Today’s mobile market is gigantic to the point that Google still tries to figure out how they can provide a better search experience to mobile users.

The ever famous Mobilegeddon or Google’s mobile-friendly update, as it is more accurately called, is a step towards this direction, with site owners being urged to develop responsive or mobile designs to increase the loading speed of websites on mobile devices.

A site with faster loading is equivalent to more chances of retaining visitors. Although there is an interest in spending on the mobile ads as figures from recent studies revealed, Google will be taking a more important role in providing content to mobile users which start with app store optimization.

Experts even claim that App Store Optimization or ASO is going to be the next generation SEO in the next few years. If you will take a look at the increased mobile use and the amount of paid ad dollars being spent every year, you will see a huge rush and demand to reach people using their mobile devices.

It is also important to note that App indexing is the newest development in search results which can leave an impact on the rank of your site pages for your target keywords.

Apps are originally indexed on Google Play and App Store, not on Google search. It made it more difficult for Google to streamline their search capabilities and marketers need to optimize on both the app stores and not only on Google organic.

With App index, apps are currently indexed on Google search. Search ranking of the apps falls under Deep Link or App Pack category.

Keywords will always be the lifeline of online marketing and now more than ever, people’s needs have become more complex and they simply don’t type two or three words in Google’s search box for their queries. Instead, they ask a complete and long question to Google. It only shows that short keywords are no longer the trend as long tail keywords are now thriving.

The truth is that this kind of keywords is going to decide the ranking and visibility of websites in the near future. Thus, it makes complete sense to add long tail keywords in your SEO strategies. This kind of keywords have high conversion rate, low competitive and are more specific to your services and products.

Focusing on short-tail keywords is very hard if you’re just starting. Leave those to the big players and websites will high authority and start focusing on long-tail keywords. They are less competitive and therefore, you’ll have much more chance to rank for those. I’m sure you’ve heard it before: successful SEO campaigns are run by companies focusing on long-tail keywords, so do that too! The long-tail keyword tactic is one of those SEO strategies and techniques you need to use if you want to increase your search traffic.

Ever since Google Penguin was launched, the web masters were recommended to review their incoming links and anchor texts used for links. This plays a crucial role in the old era of SEO wherein webmasters generated several link backs with the use of one keyword.

However, as Google’s algorithms become more advanced, the old tactics have lost their effectiveness and it is strictly recommended for web masters to avoid the same campaigns on anchor text link building.

You can solve this particular issue by trying to mix up the keywords and refraining from overloading one keyword to your site.

Also, to control your anchor texts, start working on internal links on your website. Indeed, having a great internal link structure will improve your overall SEO strategy by telling search engines the plan of your website. Internal linking is one of those great SEO strategies and techniques used by SEO experts but not so much by average SEOs. So, start working on anchor texts with your internal linking structure and you’ll have a competitive advantage.

About 55 percent of all the keyword searches done on Google will give at least one video with 82 percent of these videos coming from YouTube. By far, YouTube is the second most famous search engine with over 3 billion searches a month which surpassed Yahoo and Bing combined.

Putting some efforts on YouTube SEO can greatly help in pushing your site to Google’s first page results while giving you traffic coming from YouTube. This will then result to two times more traffic using the same content.

After you create your videos, it is important to make them SEO friendly. Remember that the description, filename and title will all affect your rankings. The video title must be made compelling, clickable and SEO friendly. It is ideal to follow the same rules in the title of your video as you would with your blog post titles. To get shares and clicks, you can also include keywords and power words.

One more strategy is to put your keywords at the start of your title then add a sub header following a colon to drive more clicks. The title must have 5 or more words then add a broad target keyword. It will not just help you rank better in search engine results page but will give you more clicks on YouTube at the same time.

Since there is no way for Google’s spiders to read videos, they will simply rely on the written description to know what your video is all about. Instead of simply throwing in a couple of target keywords, you can create a short blog post describing the content of your video in detail.

It will tell both Google and your readers exactly what the video is all about. Since not all of your competitors are doing it, this will help you rank much faster.

In today’s modern digital era, it is very easy to forget that consumers are still visiting physical establishments and shops. While it is true that they are using online resources for their research, a big chunk of commerce is still done in real life. When you have a brick and mortar business, you must not neglect local listings for SEO if you like to stay profitable.

Finding listings in your niche or industry is fairly easy. Signing up and registering your website on those will definitely give you an SEO boost. I love these SEO strategies and techniques because they are easy to put in place and can give you fast results.