SEO Best Practices: Tips And Techniques
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In a world where search engine algorithms are constantly changing, there are no secrets to ranking as number one on search engines such as Google. However the following tips and techniques can help your website standout and boost your rankings.
1 – Target Audience
Knowing your audience is the first step in dominating the search engines with your posts. Develop contents that your Target Audience would value (either educative, inspiring, entertaining, or a solution) and meet their demographics (age, gender, location, and occupation) as well as their psychographics (motivations, likes, dislikes, and pain points).
You should try to meet their goals, solve their task and do it better than your competitors (if any). When you’ve finally done this, publish at a time most of your targeted audience would be online and if you are breaking a news, publish as soon as you can such that you are the first with the information.
You can use online resources like Buzzsumo to find out trends and posts that your audience are likely to read and re-visit.
2 – Title Tags
Titles play an important role for SEO. They tell the search engines that your website is relevant for that keyword or keyword phrase. The title is your opportunity to persuade online users to visit your post and not someone else's.
Optimize your titles, such that it draws your Audience’s attention and it contains at least one main phrase that they will use to find your article. Keep your titles around 70 characters to ensure it doesn’t get cut off on both search engines and social media platforms.
Titles should be unique for all your pages as they are mostly highlighted in the search engine results page (SERP), when a visitor searched for the keyword phrases contained in your title and will in-turn increase your visibility and click-through rate.
You may customize your URL with a short phrase or title of your page. This way you can change your title later, keeping your permalink and not confusing your readers.
3 – Contents, Keywords and Meta descriptions
Start by creating a very attractive leading paragraph that gives readers a brief compelling summary of what your post is about. Proving that the article can solve the searcher's task.
Your article should be:
1. Top quality content from start to finish.
2. Unique and extremely relevant for your keyword phrase.
3. Better than related posts already on the web.
4. Broken up with clear headings, subheadings, boldness, and numbered/bulleted lists whenever possible.
5. Free from Spelling and Grammar mistakes.
You may also add relevant multimedia (Photos, videos, charts, infographics, drawings, GIFs, and screenshots) with every post. Fill out all filename, alt text, and captions (including your main keywords) whenever possible. Do not forcibly insert keywords into your article and do not overuse headings, subheadings, boldness, and bullets.
Meta descriptions are not as valuable as there ones where in search engine rankings, but are important in drawing a user’s attention from the search engine results page (SERP) to your website. Keep your character length around 160, use only alpha-numeric and avoid duplicates.
4- Social Media and PR
Make your article highly relevant by getting the right people and publications to help you amplify it, with solid links and mentions across the web and across social media.
Post links to all your articles on your social media pages to boost visibility and click-through rates within your domain. Engage and develop a personal connection with your social media followers regularly.
5 Crawl-able, Accessible URLs and Links
Your URLs should be in a text readable format, short and friendly and contain a limited number of characters. Use hyphens instead of underscores in between words and always check your URLs for broken and missing links, so you don't end up on the wrong side of Googlebot's spiders.
Use internal links to your other published content, this will help users spend more time on your website and give older publications extra online attention.
Use data and statistics whenever possible in your article to gain readers trust and always include link to data source so that users can get more information directly.
6 - Speed
Speed is one of the most important factors in keeping a visitor locked to your website, and has was mentioned in How To Convert Visitors Into Customers, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights tool or PingdomTool to find suggestions that will help in increasing your page speed. The faster your page load, the better you might rank on Google and keep a visitor on your website.
Conclusion
If you are able to achieve all of the above listed SEO practices, you're going to rank very well and increase your organic traffic. It might take some time, but it would be worth it in the end.
If I missed anything, or if you have something to add, I’d love to hear your comments below!