Find, target and shoot for the top

With responsive design, the only thing that changes across devices is the styling (which is controlled by CSS). This configuration makes it easier for Google to crawl your pages and retrieve your content. To quote Google, “This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh. The sites that Google will rank highest for a particular search term are the ones that appear the most relevant and that have the best content and best design. At the same time though, they will also be the ones that have the most trust. This means that Google considers them an authoritative resource and expects the information on their site to be accurate and well-written. The main text content on the page must be unique to avoid Google’s page quality algorithms. Use the rel=nofollow tag in the links to websites that you do not trust, you think maybe using spamming techniques or you do not want to help in the search engines.

Find, target and shoot

To achieve long-term SEO results, you must have a strong web foundation built on targeting terms related to your business, industry, and offerings. If you don’t target and rank for the right terms, your audience won’t be able to find you. So one of the most important SEO tactics is keyword research. Make it easier for search engines to index your website. Test the results of changes, and keep changes tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever you're comfortable with. SEO offers incredible opportunity and access (it's an inherently free marketing channel) to inbound traffic, but it can be hard to know where to start and what advice to follow.

Think of ways to stand out from the crowd

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. Search engines aren't good at completing online forms (such as a login), and thus any content contained behind them may remain hidden. If you’re struggling to rank #1 for your brand name among other websites with a similar or the same name, a rebrand to a more unique name or URL might give you a better chance of getting to the top. From its earliest days, Google's core search algorithm offered the most relevant and most organic search results quickly and accurately on a simple site with an iconic logo that has now become synonymous with the search giant's business. Searching amidst the world's vast data, Google cleverly cataloged and categorized pages using its PageRank formula, which assessed the quantity and power of links to any given webpage.

“Monetisation first” approach

Search Console shows your average position for each of the keywords you rank for and how many impressions and clicks this brings you. In order to rank highly in SERPs, the search engines must see your website’s content as being trustworthy. On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "Google is pushing towards more and more personalized search results, so in order for you to perform well, you’ll have to ensure that you provide a better user experience that keeps people on your site."

You must have a strong web foundation

Most SEO consultants have said goodbye to spammy, shady optimization techniques because Google actively penalized you for it since 2011. SEO today is increasingly driven by natural language search, that is, people doing searches that are more like normal questions than two or three keywords. Relevance is the key issue when choosing the right
keywords. Keep in mind that the more specific and niche
the keywords, the better. Basically a search engine searches the web using automated programs called web crawlers. The crawlers follow links from page to page, they then send a copy of each page back to the search engine, which then builds an index of the words on each page.