You might’ve stumbled upon many blogs explaining different SEO tips and methods that left you confused about where to start.
SEO is not a simple one-time task, it’s an ongoing process that requires constant research and optimizations to your content and website as a whole.
In this article, we will display the best SEO tips to follow in order to rank higher on search engines.
1. Website Structure
The structure of a website, blog, or e-commerce store is very important both in terms of SEO and usability. It should be user-friendly, easy to navigate, fast, and serve its purpose: attract new customers, get more email subscribers, make a sale, get revenue from advertising or just present the information in the best possible way.
Using a Schema Markup is also a very effective way to appear organically, as it helps Google to understand the content of a webpage and better display it on SERPs.
Remember that the easier it is for Google to understand your site, the higher in search engines your website can appear.
2. Improve Your Website Speed
On average, users wait no longer than 2 seconds for a certain webpage to load, and 40% of users clicks back if the webpage didn’t load after 3 seconds.
Google’s first priority is to provide satisfying results for users, and website speed is one crucial aspect of that.
There are many free online tools to test the website speed and give improvements tips like GTMetrix or Google PageSpeed, here are some tips to improve the speed of your website:
- Clear your website cache periodically
- Compress the photos on your website
- Don’t use Youtube videos on your website, use Vimeo instead
- Minimize CSS and Javascript
- Choose a high-speed hosting provider
- Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- If you’re using WordPress, make sure your theme is light and structured properly
There are tons of free WordPress plugin that would help with the above as well, just make sure to choose high-rated and well-known plugins only.
3. Make Sure Your Website Pages Are Indexed On Google
Usually, Google crawls websites by default without any action from the admin as long as the Robot.txt instructions are set as “Index”.
What is Robot.txt?
Robot.TXT is used to instruct search engines if you want the page to appear on search results or not, it’s a very handy feature to control what’s being indexed and what’s not.
It can be identified easily on WordPress through SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math, and can be viewed through many free tools on the internet OR through my favorite chrome extension SEO META in 1 CLICK
How To Check If Your Pages Are Indexed On Google?
- Login to your Google Search Console account or signup and verify your website (click here to see full tutorial)
- Make sure your website sitemap is submitted and successfully crawled (sitemaps can be generated easily through SEO plugin)
- Check your website URLs through the “URL Inspection Tool”, if it said that the URL is on Google, it means your URL is indexed and will rank on the results page.
- If it turns back “URL is not on Google”, press “Request Indexing” to index the page on Google, remember you can only index 7 pages per day, so make sure your sitemap is valid and only request indexing pages you recently updated.
4. Avoid Plagiarism and Make Sure Your Content Is Unique
Google prefers unique and fresh content, Google can tell if your content is stolen from another recourse and thus will not rank your page high on SERPs. You can use free plagiarism checking tools online like Plagiarism Detector or Grammarly.
Always write your content on your own and choose subjects that appeal to the readers, you can also check the latest trends and write about them promptly to stay fresh and gain more traffic.
You can check the latest trends from various free sources like Google Trends or keep up to date on certain subjects by using Google Alerts.
5. Pay Attention To Your Website’s Meta Data
Never forget to include titles and descriptions to your pages, it greatly helps to increase the relevancy of your page content and appeal more to searchers. It also helps rank higher when the intended keywords are added to the title and description.
Remember to limit the length of your title to 50-60 characters, and your description to 140 to 160 characters
6. Write Less – Show More
Long paragraphs are not the best option when writing an article, a recent study shows that readers are more likely to leave the page immediately after spotting a long paragraph.
Never make your paragraphs longer than 4 lines, include more photos in between, and highlight the most useful info by bolding them so they catch the eye.
7. Choose The Right Keywords To Rank For
Sometimes keyword research can be a hell of a task, researching and measuring what’s best and what’s not is not an easy thing to do.
- What are the best keywords for me?
- What’s the volume of those keywords?
- How difficult is it to rank for those keywords?
Are all questions we ask when gathering info about potential keywords, but then what? How do i answer those questions?
In a nutshell, here’s the strategy i use to decide on the keywords i will rank for:
- Search potential keywords and sort them based on the following criteria:
- Relevance to your content and search intent
- Volume – average monthly searches
- Difficulty – how hard it is to rank for this keyword
- Choose keywords with clear intent and high monthly volume, try also to choose ones with lower difficulty
- Use keyword research tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Moz. Or use some free tools like Keyword Research Tool from Google Ads.
8. Target One Keyword Per Page And Implement It Properly
Make sure your keyword is implemented properly into your page, here are some tips to where to insert it:
- Meta title and description
- Header tags (H1 and H2)
- Images (title and ALT text)
- Anchor text in backlinks
Increasing keyword density on your webpage is important but don’t go overboard to avoid being marked as spam, remember to stay relevant and organic before anything else.
9. Gain Powerful Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the most important SEO aspects to gain relevancy and rank higher but keep in mind that more backlinks do not mean higher ranking, some poor backlinks could cause the opposite.
Here are some tips to keep in mind while building backlinks:
- Stay away from spammy websites or websites that have high spam score, you can check spam score for free from tools online like Website SEO Checker
- Try targeting websites that have relevant content, you can reach out to them and ask for a guest post
- Gain backlinks from relevant directories, remember to check their spam score before submitting your URL
- Gain backlinks from social media platforms (Instagram – Facebook – Twitter – LinkedIn – Youtube – Pinterest – etc.) by posting content and linking to your website
- Always remember to put your target keyword as an anchor text in your backlinks
Finally, It’s not always best to only target DoFollow backlinks, try mixing them with NoFollow backlinks to avoid increasing your spam score and make it look more natural.
10. Keep Monitoring Your Progress
SEO is a long-term war against competitors to rank higher than them, it will require time before noticing significant changes in your website ranking.
Keep monitoring your progress through Google Analytics and Google Search Console, check which pages rank better, see which keywords you ranked for, and keep optimizing the ones you didn’t rank for.
Remember that the more effort you put into your website, the more you gain in the future, so remember to be consistent and never lose motivation, you will eventually reach your goal
