Most people look at SEO the wrong way. They look at ways to do the least amount of work for the greatest initial return, when in fact, it's quite the opposite. To understand SEO, you need to understand search engines. A search engine is a piece of software that crawls the internet and indexes its pages in order to provide the best website recommendations based on a user's search query. And they use complex, ever-changing algorithms to do that. The relevance of a website’s content is particularly important for search engines; it affects how high a website will appear in the search results for a given search term. Search engines are not impressed by a vast vocabulary; they want you to be consistent throughout the article.

Build backlinks

Paid links are like paying someone to be your wingman to impress a girl rather than having a genuine friend by your side who can vouch for how great you really are! Google has told the SEO community time and time again that social media signals have no impact on search rankings that that social is not a direct ranking signal. Prove that you are trustworthy by connecting as closely as possible to high authority sites. Use structured data to further explain your topics. The clear majority of websites gear their SEO strategy toward traditional search engine keyword searches carried out by typing.

Quality content gives you authority

Getting your content out there and shared generously should be your goal. Make sure the content is better than what already is ranking for your keywords; provide unique value and a fresh perspective on the topic. Consider your exposure options for your content, and get your content out to as many options as possible. Constantly changing consumer behaviors and the demand for more personalized, meaningful experiences have retailers facing huge challenges this year Writing is hard enough when you have to write 500 word blog posts. Now imagine writing in-depth articles and guides that stretch to 5,000+ words on a consistent basis. Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the anchor text. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would.

Consider your URL structure

Give the search engines some time to do their thing (a couple days, or even weeks) and then keep checking your rank to see what happened and track your progress. Remember any additional traffic is typically good for your website ranking, so getting people to visit is the most important thing. Outbound, or external, links are links pointing outwards from your site to another website. They pass along some of your own site’s ranking power. According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "If you want to increase your rank for your particular web page or website on different search engines such as Bing, Google as well as Yahoo, then SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will allow you to do this. The purpose of SEO is to achieve the best result on a search engine placing your website or web page on top of search engine."

Use Social Sharing Buttons

The biggest challenge with SEO is that it’s ambiguous territory—but you shouldn’t let the uncertainty get the best of you. Understand that almost every marketer is exactly where you are now. Everyone’s trying to figure out SEO’s ‘hidden secrets’ with little direction. Focus on building trust as opposed to trying to bend and break the rules. That way, you rise above Google's often-changing rules which are getting better and better at finding people who are looking for shortcuts. Always remember, “Content is King”. Thereby, the content should be fresh, unique and relevant to what your website is about, and there should be no duplicate content. Do not copy another site’s content without asking permission first. It’s bad for you, the site you’re copying from and the reader too.