The common website is a top marketing tool of businesses everywhere. Regardless of the size of your business or the industry you are in, a successful website is often a key contributor to growth and profits. The primary driver of success for websites is onsite content. High quality content can set you apart from the competition and establish your industry expertise.

SEO strategies have arguably become one of the most important factors to consider when looking to improve and maximize a company's presence online and general 'on-page' marketing approach. Recent search engine updates, namely Google's Panda and Penguin, have started to create a new generation of websites built solely of relevant and original content, dramatically restricting spam and ensuring high quality content ranks first. Given this evolution within the online marketing community, companies have been forced to change their approach to online marketing, link building and SEO approaches to suit Google's specific, rather strict requirements.

Great content is a fundamental part of SEO. Video content is the next big thing and you should consider video as an essential part of your strategy to improve your SEO ranking. If you’re a data driven marketer like me, check out this number from Forrester:

Designing a website is more than finding the right tone and appearance to properly communicate your message and your brand. Oh sure, you want to include the colors, images and fonts that best represent the style of your business or your brand. You certainly want to make your site appealing to visitors and engaging in a way that keeps them coming back. When designing your site, however, it is very important to not forget about SEO.

If content is king, then anchor text is the gold all kings desire. Content needs anchor text and internal links to be crawled, indexed, and found by search engines and users alike. Without anchor text the content you have spent hours creating becomes a dead-end page or worse...orphaned. A well-architected website will improve usability, conversion, and search rankings.

Admittedly, HTML5 is still a work in progress and it may be years until it is fully developed. That doesn’t mean you should have to wait until 2020 though to take full advantage of the awesome features of HTML5 for SEO. There are many HTML5 tags, global attributes, and event attributes that can be utilized on mobile devices, tablets, and even personal computers that will aid in improving your local search engine optimization efforts. Specifically, let's take a look at two HTML5 tags that improve the handling of hours of business and contact information.

Ever since the recent Google Panda updates were released, on-site SEO has become even more important when it comes to staying on top of the SEO game. Small mistakes that could be overlooked by simply doing a bit of off-site optimization have now become critical reasons for rank drops.