So Looking for tried-and-true SEO strategies? The kind that will assist you right now? Here are 30 effective SEO tips, tricks, and secrets.
There is a lot of advice out there that promises quick results, but the majority of it does not deliver.
Furthermore, many well-publicized SEO strategies are no longer effective.
If you're still using antiquated practises, it's time to abandon them.
So, whether you're new to SEO or a seasoned pro, I hope you find the techniques in this post useful.
Here are the top 30 SEO tips to remember when optimising your website:
- 1. Website loading Speed
- 2. Use Keywords In The Right Places
- 3. Make Your Content User-Friendly
- 4. Perform Regular Website Audit
- 5. Create Sitemap
- 6. Encourage Other Trustworthy Sites to Link to You
- 7. Fix pages with broken backlinks
- 8. Convert images into backlinks
- 9. Have Web Analytics in Place at the Start
- 10. Take a ‘Mobile-First’ Approach
- 11. Create Content Around Shoulder Niches
- 12. Use rel=canonical
- 13. SSL and Switch to HTTPS
- 14. Confirm Your Pages Are Indexed
- 15. Add Breadcrumbs
- 16.When Using Images, Try to Get the Vector Format Image File
- 17. Use a CDN
- 18. Get Dedicated Hosting
- 19. Optimize Your Images
- 20. Install a caching plugin
- 21. Unique and Relevant Meta Descriptions for Every Page
- 22. Watch Out for Competitors
- 23. Delete Zombie Pages
- 24. Use the Google Search Console
- 25. Improve Your Organic CTR
- 26. Create FAQ Pages
- 27. Clean up Duplicate Content
- 28. Go for Link Quality (Not Quantity)
- 29. Make Clear linking Structure
- 30. Avoid Bad Links and spammy links
1. Website loading Speed
Page speed is also important to search engines. “40 percent of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load,” according to eConsultancy.
Remove any non-essential elements that are slowing down your site. If you use WordPress, you should think about deactivating plugins that you don't actually need.
Use Google Pagespeed Insights tools to check where the page speed issues lie.
2. Use Keywords In The Right Places
You must use your keywords correctly and in the right places to demonstrate to search engines that your website can assist a searcher in achieving their goal.
Using keywords in strategic locations will help you attract visitors who are looking for what your website has to offer.
However, where you use your keywords is just as important as how often you use them. Make certain that your keyword appears at least once in the title tag of your page.
For example, on my website, I have a page that is optimised around the keyword “contentwriting.” And I made certain to include that specific term in key places.
3. Make Your Content User-Friendly
Content are lead-generation machines. However, in order to achieve the desired conversions, your content must be usable in addition to being of high quality. Use the tips in this article to ensure that your blog is read, shared, grows, and converts.
In addition to the technical aspects of SEO, learn about personas, human behaviours, and user trends.
4. Perform Regular Website Audit
Content audits entail examining all pages on your website to determine whether they should be left as is, updated, consolidated, or deleted.
If your website is built on WordPress, the free Ahrefs WordPress plugin is the most convenient way to conduct a content audit. Install it, follow the instructions, and it will provide action suggestions for all of your posts and pages.
5. Create Sitemap
XML Sitemaps are important for SEO because they make it easier for Google to find your site’s pages—this is important because Google ranks web PAGES not just websites.
After you've created your XML Sitemap and uploaded it to your webserver, you should submit it to the search engines for approval. Google Webmaster Tools makes this simple. Just make sure your Sitemap is in the correct format and has been properly uploaded to your webserver before you attempt to verify it.
6. Encourage Other Trustworthy Sites to Link to You
The goal of content marketing is to create high-quality, engaging content that encourages people to link to you and share it on social media.
Backlinks from authoritative news sites and blogs are required if you want to rank on Google's first page. By creating useful content and linking to authoritative blogs, you will find that more people will naturally link to you. This is the essence of successful link building.
Broken links are those on your site that point to non-existent resources—these can be either internal (i.e., to other pages on your domain) or external (i.e., to pages on other domains.)
7. Fix pages with broken backlinks
Backlinks to dead pages are essentially useless. They aren't helping the page rank because it no longer exists, and they aren't likely helping other pages rank either.
How do you know if your backlinks are broken?
Filter for 404 pages in Ahrefs' Site Explorer's Best by Links report. If any pages have referring domains, those backlinks are broken.
There are three options for resolving this:
Restore: If the dead page was accidentally deleted, restore it. Then, all of the backlinks will point to a live page.
Redirect: If the dead page has a new URL, redirect the old one to it. If the old page is no longer available, but you have a similar page on your site, redirect the old URL to it. Learn how to do redirects by reading this.
Request a link modification: If someone made a mistake when linking to your page (for example, adding a space at the end of the URL), it's worth contacting them to let them know.
8. Convert images into backlinks
When you search for anything on Google, you can see only the images for your search query by clicking the Images tab at the top of the SERPs. You can use reverse image search to find out if your images appear on any other sites and claim your rightful backlinks.
9. Have Web Analytics in Place at the Start
After you've clearly defined your search engine optimization goals, you'll need software to track what's working and what's not.
Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other private web analytics software solutions can assist you in monitoring your progress.
10. Take a ‘Mobile-First’ Approach
Google have been to mobile-first indexing for all sites since September 2020.
To see how Google's mobile search agent sees your site, use the Mobile-Friendly Test Tool in Google Search Console.
11. Create Content Around Shoulder Niches
It’s an add-on niche relevant to your existing niche.
It’s a way to build a bigger niche site or blog without it looking odd.
Shoulder niche examples:
If your niche is baking, adding cooking would be a shoulder niche.
If your niche is dogs, cats would be a shoulder niche.
If your niche is piano, guitar would be a shoulder niche.
12. Use rel=canonical
The canonical tag is a page-level meta tag that is placed in a webpage's HTML header. It informs search engines about which URL is the canonical version of the page currently being displayed. Its goal is to keep duplicate content out of search engine indexes while consolidating your page's strength into a single “canonical” page.
13. SSL and Switch to HTTPS
The core function of an SSL certificate is to protect server-client communication. On installing SSL, every bit of information is encrypted.
To provide a safer web browsing experience, Google has decided to flag websites that do not have an SSL/TLS Certificate installed on their website beginning in 2018. If anyone fails to follow this rule, all popular web browsers used around the world, such as Google Chrome and Firefox, will be disabled. Mozilla will punish them by giving a warning message of ‘Not Secure’ on the URL bar.
When a website is secured by an SSL certificate, HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) appears in the URL. By clicking on the lock symbol in the browser bar, you can view the certificate's details, including the issuing authority and the corporate name of the website owner.
14. Confirm Your Pages Are Indexed
Crawling starts with a list of web addresses from previous crawls and sitemaps provided by website owners. When our crawlers visit these websites, they use links to find other pages.
If you want your site to show up in the search results at all, then it needs to be indexed.
15. Add Breadcrumbs
A breadcrumb is a small text path that is usually found at the top of a page and indicates where the user is on the site.
They helps in enhancing user experience and lowering bounce rate .
16. Get the Vector Format Image File
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a vector image format for 2D graphics that is based on XML.
SVG images can help your site's search engine optimization in more ways than one. The fact that SVG is a text-based format means that search engines can read, crawl, and index your images. Other images require titles and descriptions in order for search engines to read them, which means that search engines cannot crawl the actual contents of your image.
17. Use a CDN
It is a network of edge servers (also known as POPs) strategically located around the world. They serve the purpose of storing and caching a copy of your website's assets (e.g., HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and images).
let's look at a few ways a CDN actually does help your SEO.
- CDN can drastically increase the speed of your website, It delivers your assets in the exact same way they are setup on your page.
- A CDN can assist you in indexing your images faster in the SERPs. Google image search is a topic that is rarely discussed in the world of SEO and CDNs, despite the fact that it is a very important feature of the SERPs that has been known to generate a significant amount of traffic.
18. Get Dedicated Hosting
While a privately hosted domain will not affect your search rankings, shared hosting may cause your site to be indexed less frequently.
Search engines index based on IP address, and when multiple IP addresses are used, search engines may receive too many signals.
19. Optimize Your Images
Images are typically the most time-consuming to load. Make certain that images are optimised for page speed and user friendliness. Image file size can disproportionally affect page load time so it’s important to get it right.
20. Install a caching plugin
Caching is important because it reduces the load on your WordPress hosting servers and speeds up your website. To improve the speed and performance of your WordPress, you must enable caching.
Caching allows your WordPress site to skip a lot of steps. Instead of going through the entire page generation process each time, your caching plugin copies the page after the first load and then serves that cached version to every subsequent user.
21. Unique and Relevant Meta Descriptions for Every Page
In general, the search engine behemoth dislikes duplicate content. Yes, there are times when you need to cite a paragraph or sentence from another site (and link back to the source), but if publishing duplicate content becomes a habit, it will be nearly impossible to become a long-term success.
Similarly, duplicate meta descriptions may land you in hot water. Even if you are not penalised right away, you are still not providing a good user experience.
22. Watch Out for Competitors
A sudden decrease in traffic could also be the result of keyword loss.
Examine to see if your competitors have begun ranking for similar keyword terms with new content they have created.
23. Delete Zombie Pages
The pages on your website that receive little to no traffic are known as zombie pages. These pages may exist for a variety of reasons, such as ranking specific keywords or simply serving as a page in your navigation. If you have ever audited your site, you would have definitely come across zombie pages.
Zombie pages serve no use to a visitor. They are just there, with the same content and end up hurting your performance metrics.
24. Use the Google Search Console
Google Search Console was designed to make it simple to monitor the performance of your website. Your Google Search Console account can provide valuable insights, allowing you to see which parts of your website require improvement. This can be a technical part of your website, such as an increasing number of crawl errors that need to be fixed.
25. Improve Your Organic CTR
The ratio of searchers who click on an organic result in the search engine results pages divided by the total number of searches (impressions) for that term is defined as the organic click-through rate (CTR).
Google's share of clicks has been steadily declining as a result of SERP features and Google's efforts to make paid ads appear less like paid ads. With this, you must squeeze out as much traffic as possible.
26. Create FAQ Pages
These are a win-win situation for both readers and your search rankings, particularly for voice searches.
Spend some time going over your FAQ pages.
Rewrite long-tail keyword terms to include more of these search terms to gain more exposure.
27. Clean up Duplicate Content
In general, duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match or are appreciably similar to other content. The majority of the time, this is not deceptive in origin.
elieve it or not, having duplicate content on your website can hurt your SEO rankings. Not directly, though. Google has actually said that duplicate content doesn’t outright hurt a website’s rankings. But it does hurt your rankings indirectly.
28. Go for Link Quality (Not Quantity)
As with content, quality over quantity applies to link building.
It all comes down to authenticity when it comes to link building. It should be highly targeted and strategic.
29. Make Clear linking Structure
The better the structure of your site, the better your chances of ranking higher in search engines. Every website has some sort of “structure.” It could be a strict and streamlined structure, or a disorganised jumble of pages. You will achieve search excellence if you are deliberate and careful with your site structure.
30. Avoid Bad Links and spammy links
Backlinks are not all created equal. Spam backlinks are a type of SEO backlink that is basically a link to your page placed on a trashy, irrelevant website with some random, ill-fitting anchor text. There’s sure to be a couple of spam backlinks for your website already. But if there are too many of them, it’ll look like you’re trying to use shady SEO tactics to manipulate your rankings.
The entire process of combating spam backlinks is comprised of three simple steps:
- Detect all of the spam backlinks your website has;
- Compile a list of all toxic domains (in .txt format);
- Disavow them from Google with the help of Google Disavow Tool (or simply report those backlinks to Google, and it will ignore them).
Summary
I hope you found these SEO hints useful. If you follow the advice in this article, you will be on your way to higher rankings and more traffic.
However, as SEO is continuously changing, it’s entirely possible that these practices could become obsolete one day.
