What are the top three SEO strategies?

 how to make sure you get to the top of search results for any keywords you're targeting.

At the bottom I've also included some must-have tools for making sure your content has its best chance of getting indexed and ranked highly.

1. Quality Content - People love to talk about how to “hack” seo with black and white hat techniques but we have to be real here. Getting the top search engine ranking is 9/10 about the content. To get to the top you need to find the current top search results and try to offer 10x better content than what is currently there. Google doesn't want more content, it wants BETTER content. After sorting through literally millions of pieces of content daily Googles algorithm knows what good, valuable content looks like. It seems love lists and content that breaks things down for the user.
2. Quality Backlinks - Another thing Google uses to qualify content is the places that backlink to it. For example, If you write articles on sports and routinely get backlinks from ESPN you can be assured google is going to give authority to your content and rank it higher because it already bows ESPN is one of the highest authorities on sports content. Getting a backlink for a highly authoratitive source can be on of the best things that can.
1. So reach out to a few well known sites that offer similar content to yours and ask if you can guest blog, or ask for them to post a backlink. I'd try to get at least 10 highly authoritative backlinks. You can also use things like quora and reference your domain at the bottom of your answer. You can also use other content distribution channels like Medium to share your content.
2. Avoid link farms, Google can actually discount your sites authority for having a bunch inbound links coming from site unrelated to yours, it really is a waste of money. Again, it's not about quantity here, it's about quality of the links.
3. Shares - Google has more recently began to look at your contents virility. If it's getting shared often on social then Google has the ability to notice it and give your content more weight.

Sure, you can and should also include the old school techniques of increased keyword density, meta/description tags, backlinking your own content and other white hat techniques. It really comes down to the quality of the content and if it's being validated by the public and the existing authorities on the subject.

The internet is full of content, and there is more and more being added at an increasing rate. Do your part to improve it by added content that creates value and you will be rewarded.

Google has truly shifted its argorithms to align with what's best for the user, if you can align with it you will be rewarded.

Where is the most opportunity?

Video, YouTube is the second largest search engine and third most visited website, period. And it will be years before all the content that is currently available as text has been created as video.

Right now, if you search almost any “how to” subject video will show up at the top above any text. Often time those videos are published years more recently than the best ranked text link. Text is getting harder and harder to be competitive in most industries. There is definitly a moment towards “don't tell me, show me”, because that is what the user wants!

I suggest combining the two, create rockstar content and also do a video on the same piece of content. Embed that video on your page. Google seems to be ranking higher for content that has both, probably because it's giving authority to video.

Recommended Tools

You can use product like the MOZ search bar, and install it on your chrome browser to research the existing top content in search results. It will tell you the page authority or the content based on all the above factors.

You should definitly make sur Google is happy With your site. As far as the technical side of SEO goes you should have your site submitted with XML sitemaps to the Google Search Console to make sure it is indexed properly and doesn't have any thing from preventing Google’s robotics from crawling your site.

Use Google Analytics for a 360 degree view of your websites reach, to track where your traffic is coming from and to see what keywords people are searching to find your content. There is even a great plugin for Wordpress that will allow you to see your Google analytics data on your Wordpress dashboard.