Best SEO practices are essential for any website that wants to rank high on search engine results pages. While there are many different factors that go into ranking, following best practices will help you cover all the necessary bases and improve your chances of ranking higher.
You need to get on the search engine’s top results to get more organic traffic. The better your ranking, the more visitors and clicks your website will receive.
A recent study showed that the first result on Google’s SERP receives 33% of traffic, compared to 16% for the second result and 11% for the third result. This proves that ranking first is essential if you want your website to receive a good amount of traffic.
SEO is a complex and ever-changing process, but there are a few basic things you can do to improve your website’s ranking.
The Best SEO Practices You Need to Be Doing
These best SEO practices will help your website rank higher on search engine results pages. Doing these things will also help improve your click-through rate and organic traffic.
Do keyword research
The first step to ranking higher on SERPs is understanding what keywords your target audience is searching for. Once you know this, you can incorporate these keywords into your website’s content, title, and meta tags. This will assist search engines in understanding what your website is about and ranking it appropriately.
In choosing the right keywords, you need to balance two things:
- The keyword’s relevance to your business
- The competition for that keyword
There are a number of keyword research tools you can use, such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, and SEMrush.Â
Keep in mind the search intent
After you’ve identified the right keywords, it’s important to create content that is relevant to those keywords. But you also need to keep in mind the searcher’s intent behind the keyword.
Search intent may be classified into four types:
- Navigation: The user is seeking a certain website or web page.
- Informative: The user is seeking knowledge on a certain topic.
- Transactional: The user is planning to purchase something.
- Commercial investigation: The user is comparing prices or investigating a purchase.
If you’re selling a product, your content should be focused on the transactional intent. If you’re trying to rank for a highly competitive keyword, your content should be focused on the commercial investigation intent.
Analyzing your target keyword’s search intent is one of the best SEO practices you can do to create content that ranks.
Create content for human readers
It’s important to remember that the goal of SEO is to improve visibility and ranking in search engines, but this can only be done if you create content for human readers first.
Google’s new algorithm is favoring websites that create content for humans instead of trying to game the system. This helps searchers find the most relevant and useful results for their query.
Creating content solely for the purpose of keyword stuffing or to game the system will not only turn off your human readers but it will also get you penalized by Google.
Your content should be well-written, informative, and engaging. It should provide value to the reader and help them solve a problem or answer a question.
Optimize your meta tags
Meta tags are HTML attributes that supply search engines with information about your website. The three most important meta tags for SEO are the title tag, meta description, and meta keywords tag.
The title tag is the most important of the three and it should be used to describe the content of the page in a concise and accurate way. The meta description should be a brief summary of the page’s content. The meta keywords tag is no longer used by Google but it’s still included in some other search engines.
Don’t forget to include your target keyword in your title tag and meta description for better results. It’s one of the best SEO practices you can do when optimizing your website.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
It is critical to have a mobile-friendly website in today’s world. More and more people are using their smartphones and tablets to search the internet, so you need to make sure your website can be easily viewed on these devices.
It is critical to have a mobile-friendly website in today’s world. More and more people are using their smartphones and tablets to search the internet, so you need to make sure your website can be easily viewed on these devices.
Making your website mobile-friendly involves using a responsive design, which means your website will adjust to fit any screen size. You can also use separate URLs for your mobile and desktop versions of your website.
If you are unsure whether your website is mobile-friendly, you may use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to find out. Simply enter your URL and Google will tell you if your website passes or fails the test.
Make use of social media
Using social media is an excellent approach to marketing your website and its content. When you create new content, share it on social media sites and include links back to your website. This will help increase traffic to your website as well as improve your ranking in search engines.
Social signals are becoming increasingly important for SEO. That’s why we include the use of social media as one of the best SEO practices. Search engines look at the number of social media shares as a way to gauge the quality and relevance of your content. The greater your website’s social signals, the better.
In addition to promoting your own content, you should also share other relevant content from other websites. This will help you build relationships with other website owners and may also lead to them sharing your content on their own social media accounts.
You can also use social media to interact directly with potential and current customers. This interaction can help improve brand awareness and loyalty, which can lead to more traffic and higher conversion rates.
Submit XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that includes a list of all of your website’s pages. This file makes it easier for search engines to index your website.
You can create an XML sitemap using a variety of different tools, such as the Google XML Sitemaps Generator. Once you’ve created your sitemap, you can submit it to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.
Regularly check for broken links
Broken links are those that direct you to pages that no longer exist. These links can hurt your SEO in two ways. First, they can cause 404 errors, which means your website is not able to be found by search engines. Second, they can reduce the quality of your user experience, which can lead to lower conversion rates.
Broken links are those that direct you to pages that no longer exist. These links can hurt your SEO in two ways. First, they can cause 404 errors, which means your website is not able to be found by search engines. Second, they can reduce the quality of your user experience, which can lead to lower conversion rates.
Not only that, but broken links are also frustrating for users. If someone clicks on a link and it doesn’t work, they’re likely to leave your site and look for the information elsewhere.
To discover broken links on your website, utilize a program like Screaming Frog. Once discovered, you may either remove the broken links or redirect them to another page on your site.
Get backlinks from high-quality websites
A backlink is a link found on other websites that redirects readers to yours. Backlinks are important because they help improve your website’s ranking in search engines. The greater the number of high-quality backlinks you have, the better.
Backlinks will help improve your website’s authority and help it rank higher in SERPs. Search engines view websites with a lot of backlinks as more credible and trustworthy, so it’s important to get backlinks from high-quality websites.
To get backlinks, you can either reach out to other website owners and ask for a link or you can create great content that other website owners will want to link to.
If you’re going to reach out and ask for links, make sure you’re only contacting website owners who have websites that are relevant to yours. For example, if you have a website about dog training, you would want to get a backlink from a website about dogs. But make sure that the website you’re reaching out to is not a direct competitor.
Monitor your SEO progress
To make sure your SEO efforts are paying off, you need to monitor your progress. Google Analytics is the finest tool for this.
Google Analytics will track how much traffic your website is getting from organic search, as well as the average ranking of your website in SERPs. This data will help you see how well your SEO efforts are working and whether or not you need to make any changes.
Improve your website speed and user experience
Your website’s speed and user experience are important for SEO. If your website is slow, users will be less likely to stay on it and are more likely to leave before they even reach your content. This will hurt your bounce rate, which is a metric that measures how often users leave your website after only viewing one page.
Search engines prioritize websites that load quickly and provide a good user experience. So, if you want to improve your SEO, you need to make sure your website is fast and easy to use.
There are a few things you can do to increase your website’s speed To begin, you may optimize your images by reducing their file size. Second, you may reduce the size of your CSS and JavaScript files. Finally, you may make advantage of a content delivery network (CDN).
A CDN is a network of servers that deliver your website’s content to users based on their location. This means that users who are closer to the CDN’s server will get your content faster than those who are further away.
You can use a tool like Pingdom to test your website’s speed and get tips on how to improve it.
Conclusion
If you want to rank higher on SERPs, you need to focus on SEO. By following the best SEO practices, you can improve your website’s ranking and get more organic traffic. However, SEO is not a one-time effort; it’s an ongoing process. To keep your website ranking high, you need to continually work on your SEO strategy.
