Rumour has it that SEO is dead! As with most things these days, we can pretty much track the origins of this startling development back to Google! Since their Penguin algorithm in 2012 began to penalise manipulative link building practices the obituaries for SEO started to appear in the digital press

However, as the famous misquote from Mark Twain puts it “rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated!”

SEO is not dead! It is still alive and kicking and will ensure that the topics being written about on your pages will achieve deserved visibility in relevant search listings

However, the ghastly art of keyword stuffing has thankfully served its time! So how do you now use SEO effectively to increase your reach? Let’s look at seven key areas:1

KeywordsAs mentioned above, gone are the days of keyword stuffing, with unnatural sentences forming a rather disjointed content

but never mind, it’s full of keywords so does it matter if people hate reading it?! The emphasis is now on well-written copy, and Google is now much better at understanding natural language, so convoluted keyword stuffing no longer works

It is still important, however, to have keywords distributed throughout your content, and these should be based on search volume for that keyword, how relevant it is to your business, and also what your competitors are using

2

Page OptimisationOnce you have decided on your keywords, you need to embed these in your site’s content so that each page focuses on a core term, and also several related terms

We like these two images from <a href="https://moz

com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization” title=”” target=”_blank”>Rand Fishkin

Above is a guide to what a well-optimised page should include – not only keywords but other essential considerations as well

Below is an example of a we