Timothy Carter

SEO is a duality – there’s good SEO and bad SEO. Bad SEO is considered “black hat” while good SEO is considered “white hat.” In general, what separates black hat tactics from white hat tactics is quality and longevity? Keep in mind, however, that the following “hacks” should only be implemented if first have a good solid foundation in the basics of SEO. What’s wrong with “Black Hat” SEO? Black hat SEO tactics are dead SEO tactics that don’t work over a long period of time and they tend to produce poor quality content and spammy links in the process –two things that will hurt your rankings and traffic the most. On the other hand, white hat SEO tactics will generate results over a long period of time and produce high-quality content and strong links in the process. And that’s exactly what you need for a successful SEO campaign. Are you wondering what SEO methods are still valid? Are you’re looking for some white hat SEO hacks to gain a competitive edge in your industry? If so, check out this list of 31 white hat SEO hacks for 2021. 1. Impeccable quality content creation Content has always been king. However, in 2021 and beyond only quality content will rank high. The machine learning algorithms that power the search engines have had years to learn the difference between low and high-quality content without human input. It’s not easy to fool a search engine algorithm in 2021. In the past, it was easy to rank poor quality content by keyword stuffing and buying mass quantities of backlinks that got published on spammy blog networks. Today, those tricks don’t work, at least not sustainably. You have to put in serious and genuine effort to rank your content in the search engines. Your content needs to be relevant and have context. Getting ranked high in the search engines all starts with creating high-quality content. What do search engines consider high-quality content? Everyone talks about “high-quality content,” but what does that actually mean? Contrary to what you might think, a 5,000-word article that covers 30 different angles on a given topic isn’t automatically considered high-quality. There are multiple factors that determine how search engines perceive the quality of content. Search engines look for these signals to determine if a piece of content is high-quality: Length of the article. People don’t agree on exactly how long articles should be, but there’s no debate about the fact that long content in the 1,500+ word range tends to rank higher than short content. Ideally, your content should be long, but only long enough to dive into your topic in-depth. If you’re filling in space just to expand your word count, your content is too long. The article’s topic. Search engines know the difference between content that explores a topic on the surface or in-depth. For example, say you write an informative article explaining that manufacturers produce lighters in bright colors with a list of all the colors and shades you’ve seen. That article won’t rank as high as an article discussing color psychology, why people are drawn to bright colors, and why bright colors are a fantastic marketing strategy. Keyword density. Keyword density is the number of times exact match and long tail keywords and phrases appear in an article. If your goal is to rank for a search term like “best digital marketing tips,” you want to repeat that phrase in your article several times. However, you don’t want to flood your article with too many instances of a phrase. SEO experts suggest using a target keyword phrase once for every 200 words of content. Sometimes that’s not possible if you want your content to be grammatically correct, flow, and be well-written. For example, after using your targeted phrase, you might need to begin the next sentence with your phrase (or part of it) to avoid writing a vague sentence. That should be fine as long as you don’t go overboard into what would be considered keyword stuffing. It’s easier to limit keyword density by using LSI keywords, long tail keywords and synonyms to ensure you have a variety of phrases in your article. Just make sure you don’t overdo any of the phrases you use. Links and anchor text. The quality of your links matter. Search engines know when content is full of links that lead to spammy sites. You always want to link to high authority websites over low-quality sites. Your anchor text should also be relevant to the content on the page being linked. However, you should avoid using exact match anchor text. Search engines view large quantities of exact match anchor text as a sign of manipulation since that was a popular black hat tactic years back. Instead, try using between 3-7 words that capture some kind of action or emotion. For example, instead of linking the words, “best marketing strategy,” link the words, “link building gets businesses phenomenal results.” You can still make “best marketing strategy” part of the sentence, but don’t make it part of your anchor text. Creating high-quality content with the right keyword density and varied anchor text is the ultimate white hat SEO strategy. 2. Outsourced content marketing Content marketing is a fantastic way to get high-quality backlinks from targeted publishers inside of content you create. With content marketing, you always have control over how your backlinks are presented and linked, and where they are published. Outsourced content marketing is a way to hand off the content writing and publishing to another company. You’ll still have a hand in how your content is created and will approve the final result before publication. However, you won’t have to do the work. Outsources content marketing is highly effective Content marketing is most effective when you can create content fast, regularly, and in large quantities. That sounds great, but most business owners and entrepreneurs just don’t have the time to crank out content on a regular basis. Even writing one

It’s nearly impossible to achieve any measurable search engine optimization (SEO) results without at least some link building. The high-level view of link building strategies is simple enough; place or earn more links pointing back to your domain so your domain-level and page-level authority grow, at which point you’ll naturally rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). The truth is this exhaustive list of link building strategies should only be used to give your ideas. It can all be intimidating and difficult for a link building newcomer, and frustrating to a seasoned veteran who just can’t break past their most recent traffic plateau. These link building strategies include some of the best ways to get free backlinks. We’ll also answer the following questions: What tactics should I focus on for my niche? What tactics should I avoid, or which are too costly or time-consuming to be worth my time? SEO pricing can be expensive, but repairing poor SEO is worse. What are the easiest ways to acquire quality backlinks? How do you make your blog posts and other on-site content irresistibly link worthy? How do you avoid spammy link building strategies? What are the best link building strategies for new websites? How long does it take for even the best link building strategies to work? Once you get a good system in place for link building, how do you scale it up? How many of of my backlink strategies should involve guest blogging or guest post outreach? Should I manually acquire high quality links or rely on passive link acquisition strategies? How do I effectively outsource my link building? In this post, we delve into 77 link building strategies most likely to help you boost the visibility of your own site in the SERPs. In the rest of this article, we’ll be exploring link building strategies in different categories, from earning backlinks naturally with attractive content to best practices for managing publisher relationships. Curious about your site’s existing backlinks compared to your competitors? Use our backlink checker to view your profile and get information about how you can improve. These backlink strategies will help you ensure that the links you build are the highest possible quality: 1. Quality > Quantity. And quality is typically time-consuming and more expensive. This first strategy is more about what you shouldn’t do. Newcomers are often tempted to build as many links as possible, without putting much thought into which types of links they build or how they build them. Before you even start link building, make sure you have a clear vision. What are you trying to accomplish? Which links will help you the most? What links could hurt? Based on technical keyword research, what phrases do you want to rank for? Have you developed an anchor text strategy for your outreach? It’s much better to build a small number of extremely helpful links than a large number of links that might hurt you in the long run. Be VERY picky about the links you work to acquire manually: Work to be that guy or gal in your organization that won’t take or stand for acquiring garbage backlinks! 2. Relevance > Authority. Good links exist in context. A lengthy URL existing by itself in a forum comment isn’t going to get much positive attention; it isn’t helpful, valuable, or even natural. But a link embedded as a citation to a resource page, or a solidly written article is a different story. When building links, your first priority should be the content housing your link, and the context that justifies its existence. Focus on: Links from quality sites Links embedded in quality content Links using appropriate anchor text (depending on your existing profile) Links that point to a relevant page to the content topic AND the referring domain Without good content as a backbone, your link building strategy won’t get far. 3. High DA > Low DA (duh). Google judges not just the number of linking domains to your site, but also the quality of those linking domains. Domain authority (DA) is a relative measure of the trustworthiness of a given site. Source: Moz The higher the DA of a domain is, the more authority its links will pass. Your rankings will increase with 1) enough high DA mixed with low DA sites and 2) enough time for those links to vest. Accordingly, getting a link on a high-DA site is better than a comparable link on a low-DA site. As an added bonus, high-DA sites tend to get more traffic on their own, which means they’ll have a higher likelihood of passing referral traffic your way. 4. Favor new domains and IP addresses over already-linked domains. Links pass authority from one site to another, but there are diminishing returns for links on the same domain. In other words, the first link you build on a 78 DA website will pass significant authority to your site, but the second link you build there will pass much, much less. As a general rule, getting a link on a new domain is a better use of your time, even if its DA is slightly lower. In this example, a link on a new 55 DA site will be superior to a second link on the 78 DA site. Of course, this isn’t written in stone; even if you aren’t getting as much authority, new links on already-link domains will still increase your brand visibility and may forward additional referral traffic your way. 5. Link to a high-quality, internal page onsite. You can technically link any page of your site, but it’s a good strategy to link to the best-written blog posts or otherwise most valuable content pages of your site. This is useful for a few reasons. First, it strengthens the value of your link, meaning it’s more likely to be accepted by publishers and clicked by readers. Second, it passes page-specific page authority (PA) to this page, increasing its ranking potential disproportionately to the other pages

When it comes to content marketing, SEO, and link building, there are dozens of important elements in play. But some are more critical than others. Anchor text certainly falls into the critical category. But do you know how to leverage on-site and off-site anchor text to your advantage in SEO? The anchor text variations that you use when linking to your web page are a crucial component of any SEO strategy. This is because search engines will use the anchor text variation as one ranking factor in determining how relevant a link is to the content on your site. In this article, we’ll discuss everything there is to know about proper anchor text variation, including exact match anchor text and how it can impact the SEO of your website. What is Anchor Text? Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. The anchor text can either be descriptive or generic, but it should always accurately reflect what the page being linked to contains. For example: “our company” vs. “click here”. Your website’s ranking on Google will depend largely upon how many links your site has and how relevant those links are when it comes to incoming traffic (i.e., whether they contain quality keyword phrases). The more high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your site, the higher likelihood that search engine rankings for your site content will improve over time – this is known as building an SEO foundation with link equity! On the HTML code side of things, it looks like this: On the user-facing side of things, it looks like this: Best SEO agency If it weren’t for anchor text, you’d have to write out the exact web address each time you wanted to link users to another linked page or resource. They would then need to copy and paste that link into their web browser. Anchor text provides a clickable shortcut that’s both aesthetically pleasing and convenient. But it goes far beyond looks. Anchor text is ultimately one of the top factors in the link building process. Why is Anchor Text Important for SEO? Anchor text is vitally important for SEO because it tells search engines what your website’s content is about. This ensures that your web pages will rank higher in SERPs (search engine result pages) as a result of the keywords you optimize them with and help provide more clarity to any potential visitor who lands on one of these web pages through organic or paid traffic channels. Ultimately, this all comes back to high-quality links. Higher quality anchors mean better rankings from authoritative sites – which means an ideal situation like higher click-through rates and conversion rates over time. Anchor text serves a variety of purposes and can be utilized in numerous ways, but the two biggest benefits – in terms of link building – are as follows: More link juice Google uses anchor text to help determine the relevancy of a link. So, while overly optimized keyword strings are no longer a best practice, keywords still matter to an extent – so long as they’re natural. The right anchor text can feed more link juice to the page being linked to. Some would even say it’s the single most important factor for backlinks (outside of the domain authority of the referring domain). Better clickability It’s not all about technical SEO. There’s also a practical aspect of anchor text. The right anchor text makes a link more attractive to human users and, as a result, more clickable. This drives traffic and engagement. (The benefits of which may include direct sales, but also enhanced SEO signals.) The Evolution of Anchor Text Anchor text has played a valuable role in SEO since, well, the origins of search engines. But that’s not to say things have stayed the same over the last couple of decades. Anchor text, much like every element of SEO, has undergone significant shifts over the past few years. Prior to 2011, keyword-rich anchor text was considered a best practice. If your keyword was “yummy chocolate brownies,” you were instructed to use anchor text like: Yummy chocolate brownies Buy yummy chocolate brownies Yummy chocolate brownies buy Buy yummy chocolate brownies online For more info on yummy chocolate brownies visit: yummychocolatebrownies.com Yummy chocolate brownies: yummychoclatebrownies.com Image link alt=yummychocolatebrownies The entire goal was to exploit the Google algorithm. There was nothing dishonest about this – it’s just the way the game worked back in those days. Some savvy SEO experts would find out what made the algorithm tick, and everyone would jump on. SEO was about manipulating the algorithm. Unfortunately, this came at the expense of user experience. It was possible to over-optimize with exact match anchor text and achieve impressive SERP rankings, yet have links that looked obnoxious, spammy, and out of place. Google saw webmasters manipulating anchor text and decided to make some major changes. In April 2012, the first Penguin update was released. And for anyone using the same keyword rich anchor text, rankings plummeted. And when rankings began to fall, so did traffic, and revenue. The whole cookie crumbled overnight. Ever since that first Penguin update, Google has continued to emphasize user experience, while implementing requirements that dissuade spammers from gaming the system. Anchor text is just as important today as it’s ever been – especially from an SEO perspective. It just looks a little different than it did 10 years ago. It includes ratios that are natural, including the surrounding text around the backlink and not just the anchor text in the link itself. What is Anchor Text Ratio? Anchor text ratio is the proportion of links on a website that uses any given keyword. This metric can be used to understand how prevalent keywords are in your SEO strategy and whether or not you need more content relating to those terms. The goal should always be an average anchor text ratio of about 20%. This means that for every 100 optimized pages, there will typically be about 20% with

A link exchange is an agreement between two sites to share and exchange links with each other for mutual benefit. While it was once a common practice of even the most sophisticated link building campaign, it now is considered a link scheme. Reciprocal links include benefits, concerns, and flat-out risks. Here we’ll discuss: Google policies surrounding link exchanges Link exchange best practices Risks of reciprocal links or excessive link exchanges Some benefits of link exchanges Let’s go! The Link Exchange in Practice When building links for your site, the goal is to seek out reputable and authenticated sites to backlink to in order to share your content with them and theirs with you. This helps to organically generate traffic to your site, improve your ranking on Google, as referral traffic is a valuable metric, and improve your reputation as a business. This can be done in quite a few ways, from sourcing content on social media to having guest posts done that are then shared by others, to finding broken links and replacing them with new and fresh ones. Link exchange requests to other webmasters or website owners is one of many link building strategies. It is essentially an agreement between your own website and another party to share with each other. Sounds great right, mutual benefit for all? The truth is that these agreements function much like any other agreement out there. They are reliant on both parties to fulfill their end of the bargain. This can be a problem when one site is merely attempting to piggyback off of another’s work. If you think of it like getting a roommate, you expect the roommate to pay their portion of the rent, respect your boundaries, and clean up after themselves. Only, after the first couple of months, the common areas are a mess, they keep stealing your stuff, and they never pay their half of the rent and always claim “I’m good for it.” This is the problem with link exchanges, if you enter into one for the sole purpose of link building, you may find the relationship to not only, not be beneficial, but downright detrimental to your site in the first place. There are also issues with Google and policies on link abusing and other issues that we’ll go into, but for now, let’s talk about how to prevent a bad link exchange. Google Is Anti-Reciprocal Link Building This is one of the most important points you need to remember if you’re thinking seriously about reciprocal link agreements: According to Google’s webmaster guidelines, Google considers excessively exchanging links with others to be a type of “link scheme.” Too much reciprocal linking is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it could be seen as a form of unfairly manipulating Google’s ranking system. If you get caught violating Google’s policies, your site may be penalized, potentially rendering your links as useless as your old Hotmail account. This is the most important statement in this entire post! Per Google’s webmaster guidelines, reciprocal linking is highly risky. Period!  To avoid Google’s wrath and disdain for link building, start small when deciding how many weekly or monthly reciprocal links you and another site owner will include in your content. You can increase the number over time if you find there are no significant consequences. More importantly, make sure your reciprocal link building strategy is based on sharing links when it makes sense to do so. When you link to someone else’s site (and vice versa), it should be because there’s a practical reason to do so in that context. Don’t randomly link to an article on “10 Celebrities You Didn’t Know Were Raised in Orphanages” in a blog entry about “10 Kitchen Hacks You MUST TRY.” All that said, this isn’t meant to discourage you from giving reciprocal linking a try. Those who’ve researched the topic have found that many high-ranking sites across a range of topics feature at least some reciprocal links. While this doesn’t necessarily confirm that reciprocal links will help a site grow, it does give some reason to believe reciprocal links aren’t inherently harmful to a site’s ranking. But, you may find the opposite to be the case and that Google could eventually end up punishing reciprocal links in the future (and not just ignoring them). Avoiding a Bad Link Exchange As we talked about at the beginning, all link-building efforts, including link exchanges, should be done with the intent to improve the traffic to your site. Simply adding backlinks willy nilly will do nothing but overpopulate your web pages and eventually send up red flags to Google. Even though we were talking about bad agreements between exchange partners, there are other things to look out for as well. There are millions of sites on the web and forming a link exchange with lots of them would likely be as simple as containing the domain admin and asking, but that doesn’t mean that’s what you should do. The first thing to consider is that whatever you want to backlink to is relevant, informative, and beneficial to your users. Linking to a list of your favorite restaurants in Denver isn’t going to help your business when you sell boating accessories (maybe if your customers are hungry and live in Denver, but we doubt that much of your traffic fits that description). Instead, focus on relevancy first. There are many ways to do this. Using indexes, RSS Feeds, social media, Q&A forums, and other spaces to find information and links that are relevant to your business will help you with getting the link-building part of the process rolling. Once you have loads of relevant links, use a content management system to get and keep it all organized. Having subdividers that specify content niche and other factors can help as well. You’ll want to keep this list updated as you go along because link building in SEO is an ongoing process. Out of all the hundreds or even thousands of links,

If you don’t know the importance of a great domain name yet, then you’ve been missing out. Domain names send a message and set the tone for your brand and your business. Not only that, selecting the right one can be quite lucrative both in practice and if you ever decide to sell it. That doesn’t mean just anything will work however, there are a number of dos and don’ts when it comes to creating a domain name. If you want a truly great one that will make your brand recognizable, you’ll want to follow some of the key strategies that we’re going to go over here in this guide. Not only tell you about the most expensive domains ever sold, but we’re also going to enlighten you on just what makes them great, and how to capture some of that greatness for yourself so that you too can make the most of the internet. Creating a Great Domain Name For Yourself Domains do more than just name your website, they represent your brand, your products, and your intentions as a business. Creating a great domain name is more than just picking something catchy that folks can remember, though that is part of it in some cases. Your first consideration should be the top-level domain (TLD) you choose. You may already know this, but TLDs have a trust hierarchy to them. Not only is there a trust hierarchy, but there is less recognition the further you go down the list of top-level domains. Knowing which ones are the most trusted and recognizable by users is likely your first step to creating an outstanding domain name of your own. Try a .Com Name First The top of the TLD heap in the United States is the .com domain. While other countries typically use a shortened abbreviation of their country’s name, such as .jp for Japan and .ca for Canada, for some strange reason, that trait never took in the United States. This means that if you’re looking for the most trustworthy and recognizable top-level domain you can get, then .com is the one you look for first. The hierarchy of trust trends downward from there in the United States, but if you’re looking to do business in another country, such as China for instance, then you want a domestic domain to facilitate marketing and growth in that market. It can be tougher for U.S. websites to rank in other countries, particularly those where search engines perform differently than the Google we are all used to. The best domains are usually .com domains but all is not lost if you cannot get one. Just be mindful that the further down the list of TLDs you go, the less trustworthy they are considered. Some industry-specific TLDs like .tv fair well because they are relevant to the business or entity they are attached to. This is similar to the domains .org and .edu which are tied to specific entities. Keep it Simple Like we’ve talked about, the name you choose matters a lot in terms of whether your domain has value. It has to be easy to remember, relevant and relatable. It must also do this in as few characters as possible. Think of it from a logical perspective using real-world examples. Google is only six letters (not including the TLD) your bank, social media, and other things are all under ten characters. There’s a valid reason behind this. Users don’t want long complicated names, they want things that are easy to remember and that signify something to them. You wouldn’t name your website antidisestablismentarianism.com and expect folks to remember it or want to type it into a search bar either. Users don’t like special characters either. The rule of thumb is simple words that have meaning and are ten letters or less. If you can stick to this formula and still display your brand, then you’re on track to having a great domain name like the ones on our list later in this guide. On Brand is Best Your domain name can be considered something of a signifier of what you do. Say, for instance, that you sold shoes, if you owned the domain shoes.com, chances are this would be a popular domain, it would be valued highly, and more importantly, people would know exactly what they are getting when they click. However, if you sell tires and you own shoes.com then you might want to consider selling that domain, because not only is it not on-brand for your business, you’re likely to wind up with some seriously confused and aggravated users. When we say “on brand”, we mean, relevant to what you do. If you can’t get a name that says exactly what you do in a word, then another descriptor may work too. For example, to go back to shoes, if you can’t get shoes.com then you can try other synonyms such as footwear.com. This still gets the point across of what you do, it ticks the box of ten letters, and it’s easy to remember. Don’t Steal We probably don’t need to say this, but we will anyway, check before you register. No, we’re not talking about hotel check-in, we’re talking about registering your domain name. Just because a particular name isn’t taken under a particular TLD doesn’t mean it isn’t a copyrighted brand name that someone else is using. Companies will often trademark terms related to their business without actually establishing a domain name associated with it. Do your homework and don’t infringe on anyone else’s rights in the process of building your brand. A trademark fight is not something a business wants to deal with. The Most Expensive Domain Names Ever Sold For this list, we’re ranking them by the actual dollar amount they sold for, not for how good or bad the name is. Along with each name, we’ll describe why it sold for that amount. 1. Business.com – $345 Million Yes, you are in fact reading

Your organic website traffic is typically derived from one of the following sources: Direct Traffic – someone keying-in your website URL without finding you through another means Referral Traffic – a broad channel that includes social, news, blogs, etc. Email Traffic – traffic from your cold and subscribed email campaigns Social Traffic – a more narrow referral channel that could include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Paid Traffic – could include PPC services for Google, Facebook, etc. Organic Traffic – derived from a search on Google or even Bing AI Traffic – traffic from ChatGPT (now Chat.com) and other generative AI engines Of all the sources of traffic online–when it works properly–organic traffic is the most efficient and scalable, regardless of your company’s stage of growth. It is also relatively inexpensive compared to some of the other traffic sources. One of the most important concepts associated with SEO to drive organic search traffic is the number of people visiting your site from search engines and their associated stickiness or “dwell time”. But what exactly is organic traffic, and how does it work in the context of SEO? Let’s dive in! What is Organic Traffic? Organic traffic, put simply, is traffic that comes from Google and other search engines’ search engine results pages (SERPs). Think of it this way; you search for a given topic, like “bike repair shops,” and you see a list of search results. You click on one of those results to visit the brand’s website. You now count as an organic visitor and will be included as part of the brand’s total organic traffic. Source: Google As much as 53.3 percent of all traffic on the web comes from organic search, so it’s one of the most valuable channels to capitalize on. How to Increase Organic Traffic Because organic traffic is valuable, working toward growing it can be extremely beneficial for overall sales and revenue. While there are industry, promotional and platform nuances to increase organic traffic, the fundamentals are industry agnostic: Create Phenomenal Content. If you want to outrank big companies for particular keywords, you need to create content that is leagues above competitors looking to rank their web pages for your same keywords. Promote Your Phenomenal Content. While simple in principle, this is the very essence of the difficulty of SEO and link building. Content can be promoted through email, but the outreach should lead to backlinks and brand mentions from other relevant quality websites. We cover how to garner more organic traffic to your website in our Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing here. Why Is Organic Traffic Valuable? Source: Ahrefs Why all the fuss about organic traffic? Well, for starters, all traffic to your website is good for your site, generally speaking. If your site has a 2 percent conversion rate and you make $150 on average per sale, the difference between 1,000 visitors and 10,000 visitors is the difference between $3,000 and $30,000 in revenue. Increasing your organic traffic will increase your total revenue (and help you achieve your other goals). Organic traffic is especially relevant for two main reasons: 1. It’s relevant. By increasing your organic rankings for relevant keyword terms and avoiding optimization for irrelevant terms, you can control the types of people who visit you organically. In other words, you can make sure your visitors are within your target demographics and at the right phase of the buying cycle. 2. It’s (somewhat) within your control. Technically, it’s possible to increase organic traffic numbers in any category, but more organic traffic to your website is especially accessible thanks to SEO. Organic Traffic as Part of SEO Source: Google Analytics Let’s take a closer look at how organic traffic functions as a byproduct of an SEO campaign. SEO, in case you aren’t familiar, is a combination of different strategies and tactics, all of which are intended to increase your rankings in search engines. These can be broadly categorized as followed: High-level strategy. First, you’ll have to consider your high-level strategy. For example, do you want to avoid competition by targeting local keywords, or compete on a national level? Which demographics are you targeting? Will you use a combination of head keywords and long-tail phrases? If so, which ones are most important? Keyword research is vital at this stage. Technical on page SEO. There are many technical factors that can influence how your site ranks (and how it functions for your users). Generally, Google and other search engines reward sites that are built efficiently and according to best practices. Sites that load quickly, sites that are mobile optimized, and sites that are easy to crawl all have a massive advantage, such that technical optimization is a practical prerequisite if you want any chance of ranking. Onsite content. You’ll also need a consistent stream of high-quality onsite content. This will help you build authority for your website, and simultaneously allow you to target specific keywords and phrases. These pages also serve as material that can rank in SERPs. Link building and offsite content. Link building, often with the help of offsite content, allows you to earn and construct links pointing back to your domain, increasing your authority (and therefore your capacity to rank). It’s also a way to generate referral traffic. While it’s technically possible to optimize for search engines without link building, for most brands, it’s a practical necessity if you want to rank. For more on link building checkout our Link Builder’s Guide to SEO. There are literally more than 200 ranking signals that Google uses to formulate organic search results, so consider these high-level assessments as just the tip of the iceberg. As you follow these SEO strategies, you’ll increase your domain authority and page-level authority—trustworthiness scores that let Google and other search engines know you’re worth ranking. You’ll also increase your relevance for specific keywords and phrases. Over time, you’ll rank higher for those terms when people search for them. The higher you rank, the better, with sharply diminishing returns