There are many SEO tips to choose from – and a lot has changed in the world of search engine optimization.
Certain fundamental principles, however, remain unchanged.
Targeting keywords solely for organic rankings doesn’t work anymore, but picking the right keywords remains important.
In addition to SEO juice, keywords also reveal a lot about users, such as what they’re struggling with.
Nowadays, there are so many SEO techniques that it has become nearly impossible to know which ones to stick with and which ones to disregard.
Are links a thing of the past? Should you focus on on-page SEO? Is it possible to write a title tag to drive your ranking with search engines? How do SEO and social media interact?
Seriously, what are the best SEO tips that actually work?
Search leads result in 8.5X more clicks than paid search results, so B2C and B2B marketers want to get more.
Brian Dean did a terrific job when he created a post highlighting 200 Google ranking factors. In the end, Brian’s post became extremely popular and generated thousands of new leads through organic search.
In this article, I might not be able to answer all the questions raised above, nor will I go as in-depth as Brian. Here are the ten most important SEO tips you need to know right now to boost your site’s ranking.
You will definitely drive more organic traffic to your blog if you focus on these techniques alone instead of risking a Google penalty.
Let’s get started:
1. Get rid of any slow-downs on your site
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SEO relies heavily on page speed.
Before, you could get away with a slow-loading site. A popular news site took about five minutes to fully load for me.
You can probably relate to that.
In today’s market, that’s not only a bad experience, but it’s terminal as well.
People are discouraged from buying your product if your site is slow.
Strange Loop’s research shows that a mere one-second delay in page loading time can result in a 7% loss in conversions.
A slow site is perceived as untrustworthy by potential buyers.Period.
The speed of your page matters to search engines too. eConsultancy says 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
As businesses become more aware of the opportunities to generate targeted leads and increase revenue through search engine optimization, speed is an increasingly important factor.
As of April 9, 2010, Google included site speed as one of the most important ranking factors.
It follows that, no matter how good your content or how professional your website design is, if your pages are slow, you’re fighting a losing battle for top organic listings.
Reduce your site’s load time by removing non-essential elements. Consider deactivating WordPress plugins you’re not actually using if you’re a WordPress user.
As well, declutter your sidebar by putting only essential widgets there.
Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool used to test the performance of websites. It allows you to enter any URL and have it analyzed:
Based on several performance optimization best practices, Google then provides an overall score for the website you tested:
Based on several performance optimization best practices, Google then provides an overall score for the website you tested:
2. Link to other websites that have relevant content
In the opinion of some, linking to relevant and authoritative content pages is bad because it takes people away from your page.
I don’t believe so, however. Link building remains a vital part of any search engine optimization strategy. I link out to a lot of high-quality sources and sites, including my direct competitors.
When? Because it benefits you, my reader.
You’ll notice that I frequently link to other websites if you’ve been reading my blogs. Whenever I write a new post, I link to other trustworthy websites.
You can’t expect to get from others if you won’t give first. If, for instance, you’re looking to get inbound links from authority blogs, one way to do that is to link to those blogs from your own content.
Linking from your website to content pages that offer tremendous value is already a good idea. It’s an SEO best practice.
More importantly, you can inform an influencer when you link out to them, and if they find your post interesting, they can link back to you, share it online, or email it to their vast email list.
Likewise, link building is all about quality, not quantity. If you have a few authoritative links instead of a dozen low quality links, you’ll build more trust in your niche.
3. Invite other trustworthy sites to link to you
Inbound links are still the backbone of search engine rankings to a large extent.
When you combine dofollow and nofollow links, you get a natural link profile that even Google rewards.
that encourages people to link to your website and share your content on social media.
Do you know why so many bloggers link to my posts?
It is because I invest a lot of time, money, and resources into creating a single post or other piece of content that I am successful.
Do you suppose it took a lot of effort to create, “The Complete Guide to Building Your Personal Brand”?
It took several hours over several days to create this content – it wasn’t thrown together in an hour.
If you’re at the cutting edge of your industry, creating useful content and linking to authoritative blogs, more people will link to you naturally. It’s the essence of effective link building.
4. Implement Web analytics from the beginning
Your search engine optimization goals must be clearly defined before you can use software to track what’s working and what’s not.
You can track your success using Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other private web analytics solutions.
In addition to showing you where visitors click, Crazy Egg also shows you how they navigate away from your website.
Even before you send your first visitor to your site or landing page, you should have these web analytics in place.
5. Make each page’s meta description unique and relevant.
Most people don’t take the time to write an impressive meta description, which is one of the most important SEO tips.
In Google’s search results, the meta description is the first section that users see when searching for your page.
Duplicate content is generally disliked by the search engine giant. The search engine giant generally dislikes duplicate content. You may need to cite a paragraph or sentence from another site (and link back to the source) occasionally, but if publishing duplicate content becomes your way of life, you will be virtually impossible to succeed in the long run.
Duplicate meta descriptions are also problematic. You are still not providing a great user experience even if you don’t get penalized right away.
A page about email marketing cannot have the same meta description as a page about making sales. It’s important to communicate the difference between those two topics in the meta descriptions.
WordPress users can fix duplicate meta descriptions by installing the All-In-One-SEO Pack or Yoast plugins.
Then, scroll to the bottom of your WordPress editor and add a unique title tag and meta description.