SEO Best Practices
There are many strategies you can use to get your site ranked high. But if you don’t get the basics right, your chances of getting a good ranking are minimal.
An effective SEO plan combines a variety of best practices for SEO that work together to help your website gain authority in the SERPs. Here are a few SEO best practices to follow to increase your site’s ranking and help you grow your digital authority.
Publish Unique, High-Quality Content
Content that ranks well is high-quality, extremely useful and valuable content. Remember that Google wants to deliver the top resource for your topic so your content has to shine!
To send signals to Google that your site is active and up-to-date, make it a habit to regularly publish new content and refresh old pages on your site.
Write Quality Meta Titles and Descriptions
If it weren’t for meta tags, websites wouldn’t be properly indexed or displayed to users in Google. Meta tags are essential text within the code of a web page that describes the contents of that page to Google.
The title tag and meta description are core elements of SEO. The page title tag tells Google what your page is about and helps the search engine understand how relevant it is to the user’s query.
Google tends to cut off long page titles so keep them short and sweet at around 50 to 60 characters. Use your keyword at the beginning of a title tag to give it more weight with Google.
A meta description should be an accurate two to three sentence summarisation of what information is on the page. Google also cuts off meta descriptions that are longer than 155 characters so keep them brief.
A searcher sees your meta description as a snippet of preview text in the search results. While meta descriptions don’t directly impact your rankings on Google, they can help improve your CTR or click through rates.
Optimise Your Site for Speed
Page speed is a ranking factor because Google gives preferential treatment to sites that load quickly. It’s important that your website loads quickly for both ranking reasons and to lower your bounce rate.
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see how quickly your site loads. If you score 100% then you’re good to go. Otherwise, use the given suggestions and get your site speed up to snuff.
Use Image Alt Text
In 2019, Google reported that properly-optimised images can rank your page higher in search. Google uses alt text to understand the subject matter of the image. By simply taking the time to write alt text for all your images, Google will look kindly on your site and rank it higher.
Improve User Experience
Improving your site’s UX or user experience can help with your SEO. When Google sees many people bouncing off your site to the search engine results, it tells them that your site isn’t what searchers were looking for. This can result in a ranking drop.
To improve your site’s UX, do things like getting rid of broken links, intrusive popups and ads, and offering quality content. Make your site a pleasure to visit and not a place to run from!