12 SEO Best Practices To Improve Search Engine Rankings

Optimizing your website with Seo is crucial for increasing organic search traffic.

According to reports, on the first page of Google, the top five organic results account for 67.60% of all the clicks and the results of 6 to 10 account only for 3.73%.

That means if you are not ranking on the first page of Google then you are going to lose a lot of traffic.

There are hundreds of SEO practices that you can use but in this post, I am going to share the 12 best-proven SEO practices that you should follow right away.

What Are Best Practices of SEO?

Make Your Content Easy To Consume

We mostly overlook the readability score of our content because according to google algorithms it is not a ranking factor.

But it is an indirect way that affects your SEO rankings.

How many times have you bounced back from the website because its content was hard to read?

Google algorithms improve your rankings according to the human behaviour on your page.

If your content is easy to consume then they will spend more time on your website, the bounce rate will decrease and eventually, your search engine rankings will improve.

Therefore make your content easy to read and understand.

There are plenty of tools that can help you see the readability score of the page.

If you write your content on Google docs then you can use google doc SEO assistant.

It describes your SEO score and readability score.

Also, use short and easy words instead of complex words.

Use Alt Text in Images

Alt-text is the text written that appears in place of an image if the image didn’t load on the webpage.

This feature helps search engines to describe your image to visually disabled individuals.

It helps search engines to better crawl your website.

If you are not using alt text in your blog images then you are losing a lot of potential traffic.

For example, if you type ‘images of dogs’ on google, Google pulls out a lot of clickable images even before any main search results pages.

Google SERPs indicate nearly 38% of images, which means it is important to use alt text if you want to increase your search engine rankings.

Internal Links

Internal links are the hyperlinks between two pages on the same website.

lt helps google to understand the most important pages on your website.

It is important to factor in SEO because it helps to structure your website.

If your website uses a strong internal linking structure then search engines bots find it easy to discover new content on the website.

The more content crawled and indexed on the website results in better SEO.

It also aids in user experience because if the user is reading your content then they may have more related questions in their mind and you can provide the answers by linking to relevant content on the website.

They will spend more time on your website which shows Google that users are enjoying your content and Google will increase your search engine rankings.

Because they want the users to be best served.

Cover Topics Rather Than Keywords.

It is an old technique to count the number of keywords to insert in the content to rank first.

You should focus on covering the topic rather than writing content around a single keyword.

Because your content will not only rank on your chosen keyword but also hundreds of other keywords.

These keywords are automatically picked by Google because Google thinks your content can give the most relevant answer to the specific question.

For example, if you type ‘red garden beets benefits’ on google.

You can see the top results are about the benefits of beetroots.

Because beetroot and red garden beets are the same things.

Google is smart and they know which results should come first to answer the user’s query.

Therefore you should focus on delivering high-quality content on a specific topic rather than stuffing your content with targeted keywords.

Make Sure Your Website is SSL Encrypted

SSL encrypted website is a site that uses an SSL certificate that ensures the website to be a safer place.

It is a security measure that uses small data files installed on the webserver and activates a padlock that makes a secure connection between the web server and browser.

Google has officially announced that having an HTTPS website is one of the ranking factors in search engines.

“We’d like to announce that we’re adjusting our indexing system to look for more HTTPS pages. Specifically, we’ll start crawling HTTPS equivalents of HTTP pages, even when the former are not linked to from any page “

Most of the hosting providers are giving SSL certificates 100% free because they also know how important it is to have one for any website to ensure safety and avoid hackers from stealing your information.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are the text summarises of the content on your website.

It helps users to understand what they will get inside if they click on it.

It plays an important role in on-page SEO.

While sometimes google picks a snippet of text from the content of your web page to meet the user intent but still it plays an important role in on-page SEO.

Google suggests the standard length of meta descriptions should be 160 characters.

When you write an attractive meta description it increases the click-through rate of your search results.

This means your website traffic will improve as well as your SEO.

Publish Original Content

Creating original content makes you stand out from your competitors.

Original content is so powerful that not only helps you to increase your SEO rankings but improves your brand awareness.

In your niche or industry, people will see you as an expert.

You can build a strong backlink profile because high authority websites only accept original, informative and relevant content.

You can be the one that they can link back to.

In addition, this type of content is more likely to be shared on social media.

Overall original content can contribute to the long term success of your website.

Make Sure Your Page Loading Speed is Fast

Page speed is the time it takes to load content on a webpage.

There are lots of technical errors due to which your page can load slowly.

You can check if your web page speed score is high or not using google page speed insights.

WebSites with fast page speeds are rewarded with higher search engine rankings.

Because users do not have the patience to wait for your website to load, they will bounce back from the website.

How many times have you bounced from a slow loading website?

I guess all the time.

All of your great themes, content and hard work will be wasted.

Several useful tools can help you resolve the issue and my favourite option is the nitro pack.

It detects all of the errors automatically and resolves them in a few minutes.

Update Old Content

You should always update old content because it tells Google that your content is fresh.

If you refresh and update old content with fresh content and images then it can increase organic traffic up to 160%.

It takes less time because most of the work is done early; you just have to update a handful of information.

You can see the spike in traffic using this simple SEO strategy.

Since you have published an old post a lot of things would have changed.

You should include links to better resources and make your content more valuable.

Build Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are the links coming from different websites to yours.

It acts as a Vote of Confidence for search engines to determine the website authority, relevancy and user experience.

It is an off-page SEO factor that helps to improve your search rankings.

The higher number of backlinks a page has gets the higher number of traffic from Google.

In addition, the quality of the links is more important than the number of backlinks.

This means you should get backlinks from high authority websites that Google already trusts.

This website should also be relevant to you because its link worth will be more.

You should focus on building quality backlinks from day one because 91% of the pages never get any organic traffic from Google because they don’t have backlinks.

Optimize Website For Mobile Devices

With the increase in the use of mobile devices, it has become more important to have a website that is optimized for mobile devices.

Mobile optimized is the website that displays correctly on mobile devices.

By 2025 about 75% of internet users will access the internet via mobile devices.

It is hard to navigate and read the content on mobile devices that are optimized only for desktop versions.

Now if you are still wondering if this isn’t important then you are going to lose a lot of potential traffic.

Use Headline and Title Tag Effectively

Headline and title tag helps search engines to define your content.

They will know exactly what your content is about.

It makes bots crawl your website easily and categorise them.

You can have multiple headlines in a single post.

You should write your headline in a way that Googlebot understands the value you want to provide.

Nearly 36% of Seo experts think that headline and title tags are the most important SEO factors.

Therefore you should optimize it in the right way.

Final Thoughts

If you want to build a long term solid online business then you should follow the above best SEO practices.

Going on the top of search results is difficult due to increased competition in almost all the niches but still, if you keep an eye on the latest updates and follow up to date strategies then you can outrank your competitors.

Do you have any other tips to follow to rank high on google?

Want more? No problem!

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