The changes are being evolved day by day in the world of search engine optimization. However, certain rules and principles remain the same as SEO rankings fundamental skills, SEO best practices are the set of rules designed by search engine experts to help improve a website’s search engine rankings.
Common search engine optimization best practices include on-page optimization, keyword research, and building backlinks to a website.
There are countless things that a person can do for getting impressive Google rankings and they include progressive SEO techniques and strategies. SEO best practices are known as a set of tasks that are designed for augmenting the search engine rankings of a website and commonly the best practices of SEO comprise researching keywords, on-site optimization, and developing backlinks to the sites. After you get your basics in place, you need to dive into progressive and new approaches.
| HEADS UP: If you’re looking to increase your web page ranking, a simple way is to keep updating your old content. |
SEO is one of the key trends in digital marketing that is constantly changing.
Every month, the Google updating their search algorithms. Even sometimes, every day it might happen.
Here are the few major updates from Google:
- March 2019 Core update
- June 2019 Core update
- Site Diversity update
- Maverick update
- BERT update (the most recent)
Whether you’re a business owner, who needs the best practices in SEO or an expert digital marketer who wants guidance to your SEO strategy, this blog post will keep you updated on what to keep an eye on in 2020.
Also Please Read: 12 SEO Trends In 2020 That Will Influence Your Digital World
Top 10 SEO Best Practices
The notable ten highly important SEO Best practices that everyone must know are:
- Make use of HTTPS
- The loading time of your page
- Utilize the right keywords when the matter comes to your images
- Make use of your target keyword in 3 places
- Utilize a descriptive and short URL
- Optimize images
- Write thorough content
- Include internal links
- Develop backlinks to your site
- Develop momentum with the help of social signals
The following are the topics that are more specific about SEO Best Practices:
1. Make use of HTTPS
The job of HTTPS is making pages more secure as it encrypts information between the server and the visit and it has turned into a ranking factor of Google since the year 2014. It is easy to say whether or not your site has been using HTTPS already when you go through the loading bar present in your browser. However, when there isn’t, then you require installing an SSL certificate. A lot of web hosts do propose it their packages and so, when your web host happens to be an exception, then you can choose one from LetsEncrypt and remember it’s free. Again, the remarkable thing is switching to HTTPS happens to be a one-time job and after you install it, all the pages of your site would be secure and it includes even those that you will publish in the forthcoming days.
2. The loading time of your page
The fact is no person wishes to visit pages that take a lot of time to load and so, the speed of the loading of pages is a ranking factor meant for desktop and mobiles. Many factors affect the speed, like server location, the code of your site, and images. A person can get an idea regarding the performing of his pages through the use of the Pagespeed Insights tool from Google.
3. Utilize the right keywords when the matter comes to your images
You can’t ignore the importance of images in SEO. Google devoted a full section of its search outcomes to images and it must tell you the concern that a search engine giant has with images. When a user is hunting for a specific image, then he makes use of keywords and for this reason, only, he needs to make use of the right keywords in his image names plus accompany the text. However, it is not permitted to get engaged in keyword stuffing.
Read more: Free Google tools any digital marketer will appreciate
4. Make use of your target keyword in 3 places
All the topics have a head keyword that is a highly common method in which people look for what a page is about.
Title tag – Google mentions writing title tags so that they describe the content of a page accurately and when you have been targeting a particular phrase or keyword, then it must do that precisely. It demonstrates the searchers too the offering of your page because it does align with their query. Never shoehorn the keyword when it does not make any sense as readability does come first all the time.
Best Practice for Title Tag:
Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
Add your primary keyword along with the Secondary Keyword and a pipe (Separator) at the end before your brand name
Avoid duplicate title tags
Keep title tags at 60 characters or less in length, including spaces.
Best Practice for Description:
Write effective meta descriptions with the combination of long-tail keywords and your primary keywords – 150 to 160 characters is the recommended length
Avoid duplicate meta descriptions
Do not use quotes or any non-alpha characters (Google, cuts them out of the meta description)
Heading – It is a must for every page to possess an obvious heading and it must comprise your target keywords right at places where it does make sense.
URL – Google advises utilizing words in URLs that happen to be relevant to the content of your page.
Best Practice for URLs:
At the initial stages of starting a website, you have to spend time finding a standard structure for your website URLs. (If your website is already on running and growing, you may also work to figure out the proper URL structure.)
Your URLs always begin with the root domain for your website (e.g. www.yourwebsitename.com), so now you have to decide on the landing pages.
Your URL structure will directly relate to your larger site architecture.
Any visitor who reached the page or blog post through any medium would quickly be able to see that they’re on the right blog, as well as some basic information about the specific blog post on the page.
Standard Structure for URL:
- Determine what categories and subcategories you’ll be using
- Keep it short and simple.
- Use your primary keyword.
- Use hyphens to separate words.
- Remove stop words.
5. Utilize a descriptive and short URL
According to Google, you must avert the use of long URLs as they might frighten searchers and for this reason; utilizing the precise target query similar to the URL is not always the finest practice. For instance, your target keyword can be “the method of escaping from a tooth abscess minus visiting a dentist.” This will become truncated in the search outcomes and so, you must remove stop words besides undesired details for getting something sweeter and shorter. However, you must keep this in mind to maintain the vital words. Again, never at any moment, you should be afraid of describing your page more briefly according to the needs.
Now, when your CMS has got an ugly and predefined URL structure beforehand, then it will not turn out to be a huge deal and it doesn’t make any sense to jump through many hoops for fixing as Google does show the entire URL for some results these days.
6. Optimize images
It is extremely important to compress images for ensuring fast-loading pages though it is not only the only method to optimize images for search engine optimization. Again, it is also vital to include alt tags besides using descriptive filenames. These things do help Google in understanding your images that can aid your pages to get ranking for a long-tail keyword. You must never overlook the importance that Google images have and it has sent people more than 5500 clicks in just three months.
The vital thing is you can optimize files pretty easily. For this, you need to describe your images in words besides separating those words. Nonetheless, Alt text is not only vital for Google but for visitors too. When an image does not load, then the browser displays the alt tag for explaining the form of the image that it must have been.
Top 5 Best WordPress Image Compression Plugins
7. Write thorough content
Previously, it had been mentioned that search volume is not always a nice predictor of organic traffic potential as several pages get traffic from a long-tail query. According to the study which was done on 3 million search queries, the average topmost ranking page does rank in the top ten for nearly 1000 other keywords. For ranking for more queries, you must turn your content to be more thorough. This isn’t related to the length of the content only but covering some pertinent subtopics that most people search for. This applies commonly to information search engine optimization content, such as blog posts. The 3 methods for finding subtopics are:
Hunt for applicable keywords on a top-ranking page – When people hunt for the top-ranking pages for a product, like the best-brand of computers, then they go through some relevant keywords, such as “HP”, “Dell”, “reliability”, “hardware”, and “quality.”
Hunt at results like “People also ask” – When you hunt for the finest brands of laptops, then you will see two reliability-related queries.
Running a Content Gap analysis – You should look at the URLs of the three topmost ranking pages before leaving the bottom field blank. After this, you must click on “show keywords”.
8. Include internal links
Commonly, when a page has more links that include from both internal and external sources, then its PageRank will be higher too. It is considered the foundation of the ranking algorithm of Google and it continues to remain important even today. However, Google stopped the public PageRank scores only in 2016 and so, you can’t check them. Again, internal links also aid Google in understanding what a page deals with. Fortunately, the majority of the CMS’s include internal links to the novice web pages from nearly one other page and it happens by default. It might be on the homepage of the blog, on the menu bar, or just somewhere else. Nonetheless, it is always a nice practice to include internal links from various other relevant pages at a time when you publish something fresh.
Read More: Why The Site Structure And Internal Linkings Are Important For SEO
9. Develop backlinks to your site
Today, backlinks are hugely important for the ranking signal of Google and according to a recent study which was done, backlinks are hugely correlated with a high ranking of Google. There are some ways in which you can develop links to your website. For this, you must first concentrate on the content formats which do the best regarding backlinks. The analysis of more than 900 million blog posts discovered what and why do posts including infographics get more links compared to other kinds of content, such as video. A person needs to aim to develop backlinks only from the relevant and authoritative websites or pages and so; he needs to know more about what it takes for developing a good backlink.
10. Develop momentum with the help of social signals
During this time, it is impossible to deny social media as it is a vital part of search engine optimization strategy, and so, search signals are hugely important. For this, you need to concentrate on augmenting yours. This is a fact that Google has not included social signals into the factors of its ranking algorithm but it has been witnessed that social signals do influence the rankings of search engines highly. According to several case studies, it has been proved that the effect of social shares, tweets, likes, and pins on the rankings of search engines is huge. When you wish to bag more and more social signals, then you must follow the rules as they haven’t changed a bit. The below-mentioned summary would explain to you that:
- Form vital content that is share-worthy all across your various social media platforms.
- Encourage people so that they share and it is important for getting more shares.
- Include share buttons and turn them visible.
- You can also host social media content for getting more and more shares.
Conclusion
Finest practices are considered an excellent starting point but they aren’t always sufficient for ranking. However, there are several ranking factors that one must keep in mind for discovering the SEO best practices.
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