It's easy to fall victim to fads in your quest for search engine optimization (SEO) success. They are quick fixes that sometimes offer temporary results, but ultimately end up hurting your website's chances of ranking higher in search results. That is why it is so important to know the current best SEO practices.
If you want to improve the organic ranking of your business website in search engines, forget about the popular SEO tricks and shortcuts and focus on creating lasting results.
Check out these 11 SEO best practices to help you create a website that attracts search engines and your customers.
You'll learn how to research keywords, collect some SEO content writing tips, and get up to speed with mobile-optimized SEO.
11 SEO best practices for your website
Here are 11 easy SEO best practices to implement on your small business website:
- Research Your Keywords.
- Create Great Content For Your Website
- Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
- Understand Metadata and Use It Properly
- Avoid Duplicate Content
- Showcase Reviews and Testimonials
- Understand Backlinking
- Don’t Play Tricks
- Measure Success
- Submit Your Sitemap
- Speed Up Your Website
Use these tips and tricks to improve your website's SEO ranking and start getting more organic traffic.
1. Research Your Keywords
Research keywords that are valuable and appropriate for your business. It's important to know what your customers are looking for and then use that knowledge to provide them with what they need.
You can drive your customers to your site by using these keywords in informative blog posts.
Use tools like Google's Keyword Planner or Keywords Everywhere to find relevant keywords that online visitors enter when searching online.
While we are on the subject of keyword research, you should also take some time to understand the concept of long-tail keywords and how to use them. Long-tail keywords generally consist of three to five words in the sentence.
Long-tail keywords are very specific and often easier to rank for than short-tail keywords.
Long-term, long-tail keywords have the greatest potential to bring you more high-quality traffic and visitors who are ready to make a purchase.
2. Create Great Content For Your Website
Create content that is useful, current, relevant and interesting.
When writing text for your website pages, consider what your visitors want to know, not what you want to tell them.
Put the needs of the customer first and you will have the ability to say what you want after cultivating loyalty.
As you create content, make sure you use the keywords that you naturally searched for in your post or page. However, do not enter keywords as they are quickly detected by search engines and will penalize your site for it.
3. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Google has been emphasizing the importance of mobile-friendly websites for some time now, and with the introduction of mobile-first indexing, it's more important than ever to have a website that works and works perfectly on mobile devices.
This is why it is important to master mobile optimized SEO.
You want your website to work and look just as good on users' smartphones and tablets as it does on their desktop computers. No pinching or squeezing!
You can check if your website is mobile-optimized using Google's mobile tool. If you get a negative result, consider redesigning your website or using a CMS like WordPress along with a responsive and mobile-friendly theme.
4. Understand Metadata and Use It Properly
Metadata refers to the titles and descriptions of pages and posts that appear on search engine results pages when a visitor searches for a particular keyword, phrase, or term.
To follow SEO best practices, your meta titles should be between 50-60 characters long and include at least one keyword related to the content on that page.
Your meta descriptions should be between 150 and 160 characters long and provide more information about the content of the page. Using a keyword or two in your meta description will boost your SEO and increase the number of clicks you get from search engine results pages.
5. Avoid Duplicate Content
Recycle, don't copy. Search engines penalize websites that have pages with duplicate content.
Avoid using content from another website or having the same content on multiple pages of your website. Be original, because that's what you are!
6. Showcase Reviews and Testimonials
Take advantage of social media and local review sites.
The higher your business's online visibility, the more traffic your site will generate.
Integrating social media and review sites (such as Yelp and TripAdvisor) will help improve user engagement and credibility.
7. Understand Backlinking
Backlinking refers to getting other websites to link to your blog posts and pages.
Getting backlinks from relevant and trustworthy websites and blogs is an important ranking factor, so consider using guest blogging as part of your marketing strategy.
Don't be afraid to link to other reputable websites related to your industry, another plus when it comes to search engine rankings.
8. Don’t Play Tricks
It's not about making the system work. If you try to cheat the search engines, your organic online success will not last long. It is better to avoid questionable shortcuts. Do your research to find out if what you're doing will actually improve your site.
Tip: The Moz blog is a great resource for keeping up with current SEO best practices.
9. Measure Success
Track your site's performance. With website analytics programs, you can track the number of visitors to your website, conversion rates, and more, and therefore your marketing success.
Sign up for Google Analytics and add your website as a property so you can easily track important SEO metrics.
10. Submit Your Sitemap
A sitemap helps search engines crawl and index your website faster.
If you are not using a CMS like WordPress, it is imperative that you submit your sitemap to Google and Bing.
Start by using a tool like the XML Sitemap Generator to create a sitemap.
Once the tool has finished creating your sitemap, upload it to your website. Then go to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap URL.
11. Speed Up Your Website
Nobody likes a slow website, including search engines. If your site takes more than two seconds to load, even on mobile devices, you could be missing out on sales. Your ranking in search engine results will surely suffer.
Use a tool like Google Page Speed Insights or Pingdom Tools to find out how fast your website is, and then follow their tips to improve load times.
3 SEO tactics to avoid
Now that you know the best SEO practices for your website, let's talk about three SEO practices that you should avoid at all costs, if you don't want to hurt your site's ranking.
These practices apply to any website built on WordPress, but may also apply to websites built on other platforms.
WordPress describes itself as a natural fit for SEO best practices. That said, you should also know that there are some WordPress-specific issues that you need to be aware of.
1. Blocking Search Engines
Why would anyone want to intentionally block search engines? Many WordPress users build their sites on live hosting, rather than creating a test site. If they're not careful, search engines will start indexing the site before the developer is ready (and more importantly, before they finish adding content).
There is nothing worse than raw or fictitious content appearing on Google with the domain name of your linked site.
Fortunately, WordPress allows you to prevent search engines from indexing your site by changing the Search Engine Visibility option under General > Reading Settings.
In the excitement of getting your new (or revised) website up and running, it's incredibly easy to forget about your search engine visibility settings.
If you ever turn it on to block search engines, even at the beginning of building your site, create a to-do list for SEO best practices for when it goes live, and also uncheck Search Engine Visibility .
2. Changing Permalinks
Your site's permalinks are the URLs to the content on your site. By default it looks like this: http://yourdomain.com/?p=223
To make your URL search engine friendly and easier to find and index, set it to the post name, so it looks like this: http://yourdomain.com/11-seo-best-practices-for-your-small-business-website
Permalinks can also be edited under the post or page title in the Editor window.
After entering the title, you can manually change the permalink to be search engine friendly.
One caveat: if you decide to change it after publishing, inbound links to the original URL will result in 404 Page Not Found errors.
Avoid permalink missteps:
3. Using Themes With Built-In SEO Settings
Some WordPress themes have their own idea of what SEO best practices should be and have them built in as a feature. You will often find them in the theme settings.
It seems like a good option at first, but think about it: what happens when you change the subject? There is a good chance that you will miss out on the entire website optimization work through your WordPress theme settings, as there may not be a way to export the original theme settings after changing themes.
Oh!
The best SEO practice here is to let a plugin, like Yoast SEO, handle the search engine optimization. When you change themes, the plugin settings stay in place.
Another solution, if you are using a theme that supports it, is to use the SEO Data Transporter plugin which allows you to move your SEO data from one theme or plugin to another.
What’s next?
Now you know a lot more about SEO best practices, how to research keywords, tips for writing SEO content, and mobile-optimized SEO. Put this knowledge to work for your website!
Good luck in your SEO efforts!
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