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Important principles for successful SEO

1.      Content is King

The kind of content you have on your site will determine whether your website will improve or decline in performance over time. Building relevant and unique content is the foundation and core to your SEO plan. All other SEO tactics become effective where there is high quality content in place. Without it, you cannot expect to increase organic traffic of conversions on your site.

2.      Don’t bypass, co-operate

You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Rather than employing shady black-hat or grey-hat SEO methods to outmaneuver Google, you’ll be better serviced by co-operation. Artificial manipulation through shady SEO may work for a short while, but for long-term success, you need to work within the rules that Google has established. And eventually, Google will catch up with black-hat SEO, at which point you may suffer the consequences.

3.      Market your good content

It isn’t enough to have high quality content, even though it’s most important. Organic traffic will not just be driven to a site that has good content – it’s up to you to make them and Google aware of its existence. Part of this includes improving the trustworthiness of your content which you can do by sharing on social media to increase the number of likes and shares and possibly organic backlinks, all of which contribute to Google believing you’re offering high quality and relevant content, hence more organic traffic will be driven to your site.

4.      Remove old/irrelevant content

If you have content that has been on your site for over two years, doesn’t significantly contribute to link equity and hardly attracts any readers, you are advised to delete them. However, another option is to set them to ‘Noindex’ which means that they won’t be indexed by search engines. In this way, you still maintain whatever link equity that they had.

5.      Avoid reciprocal linking

Because reciprocal links return the same value they give, they have zero contribution to SEO. Therefore, you should avoid making reciprocal links agreements as much as you can. Improve your link strategy to gain high quality links alone, because the quality matters as much as the number. Ensure these links come from sites with content related to your site.