Straight forward and well guided article on optimization. I completely agree on the point that 70% of SEO is easy to do and achieve. Keyword analysis and creating useful and informative contents for customers will definitely win the battle of SEO. Ultimately content marketing helps in attracting more audience or customers from different avenues of internet and generates leads and sales.
Only thing we need to make sure is that Google is crawling and indexing our contents regularly and we can find that from webmaster tool. Also it is good to check if there are any crawling errors occurring or not on WMT.

Thanks for a straight forward, non hyped article on SEO.

In reply to helping Google understand your website content then by having a solid understanding of the use of HTML elements with keyword focus will take your site a long way.

Some of the best results and easy to implement SEO I have seen/practiced over the years is with on-page SEO, applying the basics with keyword focus.

On-page SEO is a good fallback that Google respects.

Great article. I keep coming across people convinced the keywords have no place in SEO anymore and that Google is so advanced that it knows exactly what your content is about. While this might be true a lot of the time, I am a firm believer in getting your keywords right and giving Google a helping hand!

Really helpful post – your explanation of the potential pitfalls of SEO (and self-proclaimed SEO gurus) is spot on.

Great article Dave brother ! I read your articles every time, your blog always provides helful info, Thnaks for sharing.

using the phrase keyword doesn’t have any place any more. Writing content that is relevant has always had a place. The many changes Google goes through is in order to remove the likes of Dave’s competitors who sell the service of gaming the system in order to make product or company A look better than B by ‘stuffing’ sites with endless pages of drivvel and by paying for unethical site backlinking.

Instead, as described here, if you want to make a good website that will get hits, first, have something people want, second write about it in the way you would look for it yourself.

Of course, having a page that is correctly laid out and doesn’t include the endless spew of garbage from Wordpress will also help you.

Really good article. It’s all about making Google understand what we are offering.

Very good post Dave ! but as I think GA and WMT only provides data that can help us in our current activity plans and traffic as well as website traffic, but if Google will going to release new updates then these tools can’t help us. As you have described in “what is real seo”, I have seen many seo advisers blogs. But the simple thing is be honest with content on your website but due to competition we need to create back links but should avoid from spamming.

Thanks for the important reminders for basic SEO. Good keyword research, focus, and good content, lots of it, is so important these days. T.S.