At the end of the day, Google makes decisions based on the number of links pointing to your pages and the circumstances surrounding such links. There is no such thing as a cookie-cutter SEO plan, and for this, all parties on the SEO bandwagon should rejoice. Creating incredible content that people will want to share is still the best way to earn links. Real SEO is all about helping Google understand the content of your website. It’s about steering, guiding and assisting Google. Not manipulating it.

Do not duplicate meta descriptions

The “title tags”, or the title of a blog post, is one of the crucial aspects when it comes to getting a better ranking on search engine result pages. The title tags not only tell search engines what your web page is all about, but also leave the first impression on the people who see your post title in the search results. The content on your website must be unique and creative. It has to be relevant to your readers, and not published just for SEO purposes. To create relevant content, research the latest trends and write blog posts that are engaging. Teach your audience how to do something, and always update old content. Since Google only wants to deliver the best possible results to its users, it will push sites with strong engagement up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Most marketers focusing on SEO break down SEO into onpage efforts and off-page efforts. And when focusing on off-page efforts, a common SEO mistake marketers make is believing that their site will receive more SEO traffic if only they can find enough websites to build links on.

Regular Linkers

One thing’s for sure though, Google is getting smarter. It’s now much harder to take shortcuts or to pull the wool over its eyes and cheat your way to the top – you have to earn your place. A new shift in SEO strategy, and a redefinition of its goals, will ultimately result in a stronger campaign that can withstand the changes in search algorithms. The safest way to ensure there are no duplicate content problems is to use a rel=canonical tag on the republished article. This will tell Google that the linked article is the original and therefore should be indexed, and any ranking benefits will be passed through. When a website wants a piece of content to be representative of a “thing” – like a profile page, an event page, or a job posting – its code needs to be marked up properly.

What does a good Backlink Profile look like?

Properly optimizing your images can help you take advantage of using photos to generate empathy, increase trust, and improve a visitor’s experience without hampering load time which could affect your SEO ranking. Launching a new website without putting 301 redirects in place is literally committing SEO suicide. Not only will you lose all of your past SEO history, your rankings (and traffic!) will plummet. Always, ALWAYS 301 redirect your old site pages to your new ones to let Google know where your new content can be found. Authority is built by earning links, or what some refer to as votes, for your website and is one of the quickest ways to rank quickly in Google. This is accomplished by creating great content that provides so much value that other high-authority websites reference it. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Setting up a successful SEO strategy can be quite hard. Investing in your skills will definitely pay off though."

SEO Is Not Dead

Work with Google to provide your users with the most relevant, well-informed and entertaining answers to their questions. Prove that you are trustworthy by connecting as closely as possible to high authority sites. Optimizing your images gives your website an additional chance to be found via image search. Many people still think that having a high volume of crawlable and indexable pages is *always* better. Link Building is arguably one of the easiest steps to Search Engine Optimization, since links don’t really need to be written or phrased in a certain way.