SEO is one of the most effective forms of advertising and provides numerous benefits over paid search. Some of these benefits include a lower cost of ownership, more potential real estate on Google's search engine results page and a higher trust factor, which results in improved click through rates. Sustainability is also a long term strategic advantage of search engine optimisation.

The first step in search engine optimization is deciding which keywords to optimize your site for. Keywords are what users type into the search box for their search query. Three primary criteria go into selecting the right keywords to optimize your website: relevance, volume, and difficulty.

When Google decides how it should rank your pages in the search results, it takes into account how fast (or slowly) your site loads. Google sees loading speed as a strong ranking factor as it knows that popular sites load quickly. Site loading speed has been important for good search engine rankings for years.

What is SEO? You may have seen adverts where people promise to rank your website on the first page of Google. To do this, they use a technique called search engine optimisation (or SEO for short). This no-nonsense guide aims to explain what SEO means and give you lots of background detail on how it works.

One of the most important ranking factors is the number of links pointing to your site. Google looks at these links, determines their quality and ranks your website accordingly. So before your content can rank, it needs links. But which type of links are best - internal links or external?

Evergreen content is always updated and always relevant; it is content that you write once and it keeps ranking for years. Like an evergreen tree that stays that way all year round, evergreen content never becomes tired or dated.

If you're making changes to your website, you should bear in mind the impact of those changes to your search engine rankings. As SEO is such a finely balanced and fast changing science. any changes that you make to your website could affect your position in the search rankings.

If your site disappears from the Google rankings or slips down dramatically in the natural search results then you may have been hit by a Google penalty. Google applies spam actions to websites that go against their Webmaster Guidelines and this can have devastating results on your search visibility . This guide will show you how to fix Google penalties.

So you want to add content to Google. How do you do it? Adding content to Google is a must if you want your website or app to show up in the search listings. Luckily, Google has made it easy to add content to their search engines. You don't need to be an SEO specialist to do this. The process is, in fact, quite simple.

SEO has many different facets and consequently requires a very varied skillset. Many people teach themselves SEO skills out in the field; coming at it from either a marketing or web development angle. But what skills does an SEO actually need? At its very basic level, search engine optimisation consists of three areas: structure, content and links.

This article looks at the data behind the sites that rank #1 on Google and other search engines. What do they do that gets them to the number one position? How can you use their techniques to make your site rank higher than it currently does?

SEO is a method of increasing the ranking of your website on Google and other search engines. The objective of SEO is to help prospects find your site. You get more traffic when your site shows up on the first screen of Google’s search engine results page for the most important keywords potential customers search when looking for what you sell.

Anchor text diversification and good practise search engine optimisation go hand in hand. The website having the most quality backlinks with keyword specific anchor text will show up first in Google for that particular keyword. Unfortunately, you will be penalised by Google if you don't do this correctly so this article demonstrates the correct approach.

SEO backlink indexing is very important for search engine optimisation. If you go to the trouble of creating hundreds of high quality backlinks to improve your visibility in Google search results but the backlinks are not indexed then you've wasted your time. This tutorial will show you how to ensure your backlinks get indexed by Google for free and make them work for you.

Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go and all the popular search engines are looking for quality content to serve to their searchers. To determine whether a web page is of sufficient value for them to index it, they measure the uniqueness and quality of each web page. There are two ways that they do this: by measuring the quality of the content and then measuring the user interaction with the web pages.

Keyword research simply means finding relevant keywords that will give you better results in search engines and drive more qualified leads to your website. You probably know already which keywords you want to rank for but keyword research involves looking at a number of other sources to find either more profitable, more common or long tail keywords that you can also rank for.

Penalty free link building methods can be hard to come by in these ever complicated times. The methods listed here work really well in most niches and have little chance of incurring penalties with the major search engines such as Google and Bing. Increasing the inbound links to your website is an important part of search engine optimisation.

Local search success means getting your business listed in Google at the top of page one. The best way to achieve this is by appearing in the area at the top of the search listings that Google calls its 'local snack pack'. This is where Google shows a map of relevant companies and a listing of three companies that it deems to be important, along with their reviews and addresses. This article shows you how to achieve this.

Long Tail SEO is a really useful technique to generate organic search traffic for your website. It is based on the proven theory that long tail keywords are easier to rank for than generic keywords for which the competition is really high. These long tail keywords also bring in more qualified leads and convert more visitors to customers than generic keywords do.

In my Onsite SEO Beginners Guide, I wrote about how modifying the content on your website can affect your search engine rankings. This offsite SEO beginners guide explains how getting links to your site from other sites can propel your web pages up the search engine listings.

This onsite SEO beginners guide aims to familiarise you with the basics of SEO. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) simply means optimising your web site so that it ranks highly in the search engines, and as the vast majority of search is done through Google, it really means making your site Google ready. This is done in two ways. The first of these is making the content on your own site relevant to what people are searching for – this is known as on-site SEO.

You may ask Are SEO friendly headlines important? Well, yes they are. Just writing great content for your website doesn’t mean that it will attract visitors. You may write the most relevant content that is out there for a certain niche but if your headline doesn’t portray this then you may as well not bother.

Although SEO should not be by any means be your entire marketing strategy, you should view SEO as part of your marketing strategy and a very inexpensive and profitable part at that. Search engines can drive dramatic quantities of focused traffic to your website and visibility in search engines creates the implication of endorsement by Google.

Keeping abreast of your competitors is vital for SEO marketers. You can research this by using a number of helpful online tools which will keep track of your competitors' SEO activities. These tools will help inform you of customer's search rankings as well as a variety of other factors which will help inform you of their marketing efforts.

Taking care over what your site looks like in Google Search Results is an important consideration. Potential customers will read the url, title and the short snippet that google provides them with before making a decision as to whether to click on your link or not. Therefore its important to get this right by using a selection of free online tools for previewing Google search results.

On April 21st 2015, Google changed their search algorithm to boost the search rankings of mobile friendly web pages. This means that pages that are legible and usable on mobile devices (phones, tablets, watches, etc) will rank significantly higher in mobile search results than those that are not mobile friendly. This applies to individual web pages and not the site as a whole.

If you're adding a link in the content of your page and you don't want to lose any link juice then you should use the nofollow link attribute. For example, you may want your article to be authoratitive on a particular subject but have a link in your page to another site. You can add a nofollow to the link and your page will retain its authority.