Know About Top 18 SEO Best Practices 2021
So you often hear about Search Engine Optimization but are not sure of what are the best practices of SEO. All you need to know about top 18 SEO best practices 2021 which helps you improve your business.
SEO is basically a process where you optimize your websites so that people can easily find it on the top. It is an effective mechanism to drive organic traffic, boost conversions and improves brand awareness.
So, are you interested to learn about the top 18 SEO best practices?
Here’s all you need to know about SEO best practices.
Firstly, Keyword Research is the most essential part of SEO. There are tools like SEMRUSH, GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER, etc. that make things easier.
1. Title Tag Optimization:
It is an essential part of on-page SEO. Right Title tag optimization helps your articles rank higher on search engines. The title tag is nothing but an HTML tag that provides an idea to the reader on what topic the page is based on.
Your title tag should consist of your primary keyword and see that it starts with the key word. Duplicate title tags have a negative impact on your page and are useless to both search engines and users. It is important to use unique tags to maintain your SEO standards.
2. Meta tag optimization:
Search engines increasingly value a good user experience, and that includes making sure that your site satisfies a user’s query as best as it possibly can. Meta tags help with this by making sure that the information searchers need to know about your site is displayed upfront in a concise and useful fashion.
There are different types of Meta tags.
Meta Description should include your target keyword. It is worthy to spend time on Meta tag optimization as your Meta descriptions decides whether the user will click on it or not in the first go.
3. Headings:
<h1> element is the main heading of the page. The main title if your page is always in H1 Tags and subheadings In H2 Tags. These tags are HTML elements that denote headings of a page.
H1 contains the subject matter and H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 tags breakup the content in sound parts for the reader to easily understand the concept. Your main keyword should be included in h1 tags. This is one of the top 18 SEO best practices 2021.
4. URL Optimization:
The next step after selecting a good domain name is to optimize the URLs and make it more SEO-friendly. To optimize, include primary Keyword in Your URL/ The URLs should be unique and memorable in order to boost traffic to your site.
It is more likely that people will remember your URL, share and link to them if they are unique. It should have the main keyword of your page so that it improves your SEO.
5. Image Optimization and Alt Tags:
Images have the capacity to boost the speed of your site and Page Speed score. Optimized Alt Tags is one of the important practices of SEO. Your page’s target keyword should not be used as the alt tag for every page and for every image on the page.
Write unique alt descriptions that define the specific contents of the image, and avoid repetition. Alt tags should be rightly described to optimize images in your page.
It helps Google understand your image and enables its ranking high in search engines. Thus image and alt tags optimization plays a vital role in SEO.
6. Content optimization:
Content is the key area in the digital marketing process. SEO and Content are deeply connected to each other. The content you write should be unique and error free as Google uses tags like Basic, Intermediate and Advanced to rate your command over the language.
Researching your target audience- The first step to optimize your content is to research your target audience. Find out your audience so that you can reach them easily by catering to their interests.
Finding valuable keywords: Next step is to figure out all the valuable key words and note it down in a sheet. Filter the best suitable ones for your page and include them in your writing.
Optimizing word count: Word count optimization is necessary as Forbes suggests that SEO demands a minimum of 600 words per page. Google’s standards mark websites with less than 300 words as “thin” and do not rank them high. There are different criterions of word count for different segments like websites should not have less than 300 words, and articles, blogs should have a minimum of 1000 words for Google to rank.
Primary Keyword in First 50 to 100 Words: It is essential to have the primary keyword included in the first 50 words of your page. Primary keywords are those words which have high search volumes. Using primary keywords in first 50 words will help Google recognize your page and help it rank high in the search engines.
7. Mobile-friendliness:
Mobiles are the most widely used gadgets in recent times. So ensure that in order to boost traffic your website should be mobile friendly. It becomes easy for users to access through mobiles as we use mobiles 24/7. Users have mobiles all the time at their disposal and thus to grow your reach you should create mobile friendly websites and applications.
8. User Experience:
User experience is significant as it caters to the needs of the users. UX design involves the architecture of the entire process of branding, design, and function. It is basically how a site functions. So the UI of any site should be easy, accessible and user-friendly.
It aims to offer the users a good experience to build brand loyalty and define the success rate of your business. UI plays a vital role in ranking as sites with good UX are rated with 4-5 stars and rank higher in search engines. The content structure should be focused entirely towards providing positive user experience.
9. Page Speed Otimization:
Configure a fast infrastructure or use a fast host to increase your page speed. Use a CDN, Gzip for file compression, reduce the number of HTTP requests, and streamline your HTML to optimize your page speed.
It is important to optimize your page speed to provide a good user experience. Another way to optimize your page seed is by optimizing images and by cleaning up your media library.
Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool can give you a basic idea of how your pages perform. Simply enter a URL and you’ll be given a score between 0 and 100, as well as suggestions for improvement.
10. Internal Linking Structure:
Internal linking structure is a process to add links in the content that redirects to a different page on the same domain. Internal links are widely used in main navigation.
These types of links are very useful as they help Google recognize you and rank you higher. It allows the users to discover your website pages and get to know about the information that you provide.
11. Use of Outbound Links:
Outbound links help search engines discovers useful content. There are various benefits of use of outbound links. It helps in building organic traffic, builds trust, and form new business relations. It is vital to use outbound links in SEO as it enables your brand reach at top positions. Outbound links refer to the links in the content that redirect to a page of different website.
12. Working Links:
The standard HTTP error message code 404 errors denotes that the website couldn’t be found on the server. It is either because the webpage was removed or the user did not type the correct URL. Proper manifestation of links is essential to succeed in SEO.
13. HTTPS Security:
HTTPS, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Security is the application protocol through which data communication take place. Users can retrieve web pages with the help of HTTPS. It is very unlikely that HTTPS can get hacked.
14. Sitemap and Robots:
Sitemap.xml: One of the most effective ways to notify search engines which pages on your site to index is to use an XML sitemap. It offers search engines an understanding of your site’s hierarchy and allows you to mark high-quality pages for inclusion in Google’s index. Follow the recommended practices given below to generate an effective sitemap that search engines like Google can readily find.
You can use this sample sitemap.xml to get started. Here you can check example sitemap https://www.example/sitemap.xml with the REST method URL that lists the URLs in your site.
Robots.txt: Robots.txt is a file on a website that tells search engine crawlers which parts of the site they shouldn’t visit. Robots.txt is a plaintext file with WebCrawler-specific commands and syntax. Despite the fact that it is not technically specified, robots.txt is widely used by all search engines.
15. Maintaining active social media accounts:
is another important part of SEO. Social media accounts help in building organic traffic, boost conversions and grow reach. Regular posting, replying to queries and comments keeps you active on social media handles and help your customers feel accountable of you. Thus you can win consumer loyalty with the help of expanded social media.
16. Google My Business:
Having a Google My Business profile is very useful in SEO. It helps people to check your store online and gives an insight on where it is located and how it operates. It also helps search engines to easily locate you and builds a positive user experience.
17. Blog
Implementing a blog on your site is a very useful strategy in SEO to acquire traffic. Your blogs should be interesting and formatted properly so that the reader is able to understand your writing. Using of right keywords is very important in SEO. Your blogs or articles should have the right keywords added into the content for search engines to locate you faster and rank you higher.
18. Link Building:
Networking with high-quality sites and link building are also essential parts of SEO. High quality backlinks are links that are of high trusted sources or high domain authority (DA). A website that is having a score of greater than 70 is a high authority website.
The more high quality links you build, the better your rankings will be. There are smarter ways to earn quality backlinks. To get free quality backlinks write a guest post for other quality sites.
Guest blogging is one of the commonly known link building strategies. Find out quality websites that accept guest posting and start writing engaging content to boost your SEO traffic.