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SEO Best Practices

SEO is essential for any business owner, whether you are a blogger, have an online company or even a brick and store. There are many tips out there on the internet that give SEO tips that either don’t apply to everyone or simply aren’t fundamental. Let’s talk about the best practices which are necessary if you want to advance your SEO and get a top ranking in the Google SERPs.

IMPROVE YOUR PAGING LOADING SPEED

Loading speed has been an essential part of SEO since 2010. Google has emphasized the importance of a page’s loading speed on its ranking in the search results. Thus it is crucial that you improve your site’s speed. Google has a tool called “Google’s page speed insight,” which can perform a scan of your website and give you an accurate idea of how fast or slow your site loads. Alternatively, you can also opt for “Google search console” that not only checks individual pages but can also give you a full analysis of your site’s speed, pointing out all the factors negatively impacting it. Some of the speed issues can be easy to solve, while others may require professional help.

Many factors can affect the speed of a site. Some of the factors include:

The site’s code
Server location
Images

Among these, there are many other factors as well that can slow down a site. However, there are four main things that you can do to keep the site’s speed relatively optimum:

Compress images

Images load relatively slowly; the larger the size of the image, the slower it loads. Thus, your page also loads much slower. To get around that, compress the images of your site before uploading them. This will make the images load quicker, and the page will follow suit.

Lazy loading

Lazy loading is when your site waits to load additional data on a page until it is required. This saves the site loading up content that might not be needed. This can greatly speed up the page as a large chunk of data is not loaded along with the page.

Clean/non-bulky theme

Extra clutter and bulk with the theme can also make the site seem clunky. A good way to optimize is to have an efficient and clean theme that doesn’t take up extra room and emphasizes your content.

KEEP THE URL CONCISE

A great practice that all site owners should follow is to keep their URL short and simple. Firstly, Google themselves stated that a long URL tends to intimate the reader. This is why your long title tag should also not be the same as your URL. Not only can it be annoying for the user, but it also becomes much more difficult to read.

Instead, you should go for a shorter URL that can be easily read. Don’t forget to leave out any important information in your URL, though. You want to make it as clear as possible without being overly wordy.

OPTIMIZE IMAGES

While compressing your image to make the file size small is important, people often forget to optimize the images. Optimizing images can help bring in a lot of traffic to your page and eventually make you rank higher on search engines. It also gives you the opportunity to rank your images. There are two ways to optimize your images for search engines:

Adding alt tags
Alt tags not only allow you to rank your content, it even allows you to add your keyword and rank for that. It is the alternative text for an image when the image doesn’t load, due to a network issue or lazy loading. It allows users to get the context of the image without the image loading. Alt-text is also quite beneficial when page readers are used; they allow images to be described. Overall, alt tags improve the user experience and help you rank better.
Descriptive file names
Descriptive file names are the easiest part. It is almost impossible for google web crawlers to understand the image’s content if it is named with some numbers. Instead, you should make your image file name, a description of what the file contains. This way, Google can understand the image better.

TARGET LESS COMPETITIVE KEYWORDS

Sure, the appeal of choosing a popular keyword and raking in all the traffic from it sounds great. In reality, however, the chances of ranking in the top spots for those highly competitive keywords are quite slim. The best approach would be to try and rank for keywords that might have a little less competition and rank in the top 3. It is much easier to do that since there is less competition and doesn’t require many authoritative backlinks. While these less competitive keywords won’t have a large enough search volume as the popular keywords, it will still give a higher chance of ranking first.

USE HTTPS TO SECURE YOUR SITE

In 2014 Google announced a ranking factor that stated that it would favour secure sites. So if your webpage was secured, you would be ranked higher than those that are not. This means that your website must be safe to use. You can check this by checking for the lock sign as the beginning of your URL. If there is a lock present, that means your site is HTTP protected. If not, you should install an SSL certificate to get the security feature.

Many host sites offer this security feature built-in as a part of their package, but even if they don’t, you can get this quite easily. The best part? You only have to secure your website once; after that, all your pages added in the future will automatically be updated.

These are just a few of the SEO tips that are an absolute necessity to make the website grow by getting organic traffic through search engines. While these are some of the ways you can improve your ranking, these may not always be enough. You will also need high-quality content along with various other techniques to make sure you maintain that ranking so your page can continue to grow.

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