SEO Fundamentals
SEO Metrics

SEO Best Practices

Good SEO practices provide numerous benefits for a website. They enhance organic visibility in search engine results, increasing the likelihood of attracting targeted traffic and potential customers.

Effective SEO helps build credibility and trust with users, as it focuses on providing a positive user experience, relevant content, and proper website structure. 

In this article, you will learn:

  • SEO Best Practices: Tips To Improve Your Rank
  • Know Your Target Keyword
    • Use Your Target Keyword In Your Content
  • Create Unique Content That Provides Value
  • The Importance Of Optimizing
    • Optimize Your Headings
    • Optimize Your Title Tag and Meta Description
    • Optimize Your Images
  • Internal Link Your Pages
  • Fast Loading Pages
  • Make Your Pages User-Friendly
  • Build Backlinks
  • Conclusion

SEO Best Practices: Tips To Improve Your Rank

Around 91% of searchers do not go past Page 1. The 1st position has a clickthrough rate of 43.32%, the 2nd at 37.36%, the third position at 29.90%, 4th at 19.38%, and 5th at 10.95%.

It gets lower as the rank gets lower. This is why in SEO, not only do sites target to get into the first page, but also to get into the top 3, if not number 1, as these positions get the most clicks. (Data According to ClicktaDigital).

SEO is a moving target though and Google has over 200 ranking factors to consider when getting a page ranked. This can seem daunting and it can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to optimizing your page for rank, in order to get to that coveted number 1 spot. 

Know Your Target Keyword

One of the first and most important in getting started is to know the keyword that your page will be targeting. Everything will be revolving around knowing your target keyword and using it in your SEO campaign. 

Keyword research is researching what your potential visitors or customer are searching for in search engines when they search for your site, product, or service.

Once you discover and decide on the target keyword for your page, you will be able to optimize your page for that term and use it on your SEO campaign, in order to show up for that term when people search for it. 

There are various keyword research tools that can help you discover the right keyword to target. It would be able to show what people terms people use when searching, the search volume for each term, and how difficult it is to target that term.

The more people that search for that term, the more competitive the keyword is. 

When choosing the right keyword to target for your page, there are various factors to consider such as the search volume, the competitiveness of the term, and also your goal for that particular page. 

Use Your Target Keyword In Your Content

Now that you know your target keyword for your page, it is important to use your target keyword in your content. Using your target keyword in the content helps search engines know what your page is about.

Without your target keyword appearing on your content, Google will not know that it should rank you for that particular term. 

Use it a couple of times on your content. We recommend doing a competitive analysis of your competitors who are ranking for your target keyword, in order to have a baseline with regard to how many times your keyword should appear on your page. 

Aside from using your target keyword, use variations of your target keyword, matches, and also LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). This would help search understand further what your page is about. 

Create Unique Content That Provides Value

Gone are the days when you can put out crappy content and just sprinkle your target keyword a number of times on that page, and you’d rank for it. 

If you would like your page to rank, your content needs to be quality content that provides value to the visitors of your site and is able to match their search intent. 

Avoid duplicate content. While there is no penalty per se for duplicate content, this can get your page filtered out in the results. 

Looking through the content that is ranking at the top would help give you an idea of what type of content Google likes and searchers are looking for.

This can help you get started in generating what type of content your page should have – topics being discussed, htags being used by your competitors, word count, etc. Aim to replicate what they are doing and not only that but to surpass it and be better than their content. 

Remember, provide value to the visitors of your site, and what better way to do that than providing them what they are looking for and giving them better and more exhausting content than your competitors. 

The Importance Of Optimizing

Optimizing a webpage for SEO is crucial for several reasons.

Firstly, it ensures that search engines can effectively crawl and index the content, making it discoverable to potential users. Secondly, SEO optimization helps improve the visibility and ranking of the webpage in search engine results, increasing the chances of attracting organic traffic and potential customers.

Optimizing for SEO involves creating relevant, high-quality content and improving the user experience, leading to higher engagement, longer dwell times, and ultimately, better conversion rates.

Optimize Your Headings

The structure of your content is also an important factor to consider. Remember how I mentioned looking at the content of your competitors and the headings that they use as this serves as a guide for your content? 

Aside from the headings providing structure to your content, you can use your target keyword, variations of it, and secondary keywords in your headings.

Optimizing your htags helps search understand what your content is about, and the different topics that are being discussed, and also helps you rank for multiple terms. 

Use your target keyword in your H1 and then different variations of your target keyword or secondary keywords in the succeeding htags. 

Optimize Your Title Tag and Meta Description

The title tag and meta description are very important parts of your page. These two are what show up in the search results and can be the determining factor to whether a visitor will click on your site or opt for another page that has a more enticing title and description. 

The title and meta description tells both users and search engine what your page is about. Add your target keyword in both the title tag and meta description and accurately describe what your page is about.

In addition, make it the description enticing and interesting enough to make users want to click on it and visit your page. 

The Title should be within 60 characters and the meta description should be under 160 characters. Google will truncate titles and meta-descriptions that go beyond the limit. 

In addition to creating an accurate and enticing title and meta description, make sure that they are also unique and that no other pages on your site share the same titles and meta-descriptions. 

Optimize Your Images

Aside from optimizing your textual content, it is also important to optimize your image for search. This means choosing images that match your content and going for a fast-loading image format without sacrificing the quality of the image.

Slow loading images can affect your page speed and can result in your users exiting your site. 

More importantly, use your target keyword in the image title and alt tag. Make sure that the alt text and image description also accurately describe what the image is. The title, description, and alt text help both the visually impaired and search engines understand what the image is.

The search engines do not have eyes and they rely on these details in order to understand the content.

Not only will optimizing your images this way help your page rank, but it also helps your images rank in image search which is another avenue for traffic to your site.

Internal Link Your Pages

According to Google, Internal Linking helps them understand the structure of a site and helps them determine what pages of a site are important (Important pages should have an internal link from the homepage).

Make sure to build internal links to your page and to use your target keyword when internal linking as this helps Google determine what the page is about and to rank your page for that keyword. 

Building internal links from a strong page of your site to your page also helps increase the authority of the page as it passes on juice from the strong page to your page. 

Another is to also link to relevant pages of your site that users may be interested to visit. This would help keep users stay longer on the site. 

There are different ways of internal linking and internal linking is a very powerful arsenal that is often not maximized. 

Fast Loading Pages

According to Google, page speed is an important ranking factor. Not only does Google consider how fast a page loads when it comes to ranking, but users also prefer faster-loading sites.

Users that encounter slow-loading pages more often than not leave the page instead of waiting for the page to load. 

Optimizing your images, reducing redirects, using a CDN, and deleting unnecessary code and plugins, can help improve the speed of your site and pages. 

Make Your Pages User-Friendly

With the page-experience update, also known as the core web vitals, Google has given more importance to user experience. Google has stated time and time again that they give importance to relevant, high-quality content.

And now, they also want to provide a great user experience to visitors of a site or page by ranking sites that also work well and that do not have any issues when a visitor goes to the site.  

Make your site/pages fast-loading, mobile-friendly, visually stable, and easy to navigate.

Aside from providing quality content, a user-friendly site would keep your visitors happy and satisfied cause at the end of the day, we build our site and pages for the users and not for search engines.

Build Backlinks

Backlinks are an important ranking factor. They are links from one website to another and Google considers them a positive vote from one page to another.

They basically read backlinks as the content is valuable and useful, which is why it has received the link from the other website. 

The more high-quality links a page has, the higher the rank it could have. This means that getting backlinks to your page is a really important factor. 

So how do you get backlinks to your site? Creating quality content that provides value to users gives your pages a higher probability that others would link to them. 

Take note though that not all backlinks are the same and that backlinks from authoritative, high-quality sites provide more value. It is best to avoid links from spammy sites, too, as these can cause more harm than good.

There are different ways that you can build links to your site but it is best to proceed with caution and to be careful with it.

Conclusion

Those are our best practices tips in building a foundation to get your pages/site ranked in search. These tips can sometimes be enough in getting your page up to the top, depending on the competitiveness of your target keyword. 

Nevertheless, these tips should be enough to get you started in your SEO and get your pages and site ranked up to the top. 

More Topics
chevron-leftchevron-rightarrow-right