The level of competition online is forever growing, for this reason, it’s important that you’re familiar with all the latest and best SEO practices and methods. As the digital marketing space advances, new and improved techniques are introduced.

When we look at the various good SEO practices and strategies, we find that, for the most part, they are doable, however, if we want to stay one step ahead of our competitors, it’s important that we’re familiar with all the new changes and methods introduced.

Even the very best in the SEO space spend a considerable amount of time learning all the various changes to SEO, so that they can get and maintain the highest rankings in the search engines.

Changes are constantly happening in the SEO industry, or at least, that’s how it feels, for this reason, if you stay always up-to-date, following all the new introductions, you can ensure that you’ll beat all your competitors.

This brings us to this article. Here, you will learn several of the best SEO practices. These are things that you should and must know, if you want to get the most out of SEO.

1. Content Quality

You always want to ensure that your content matches the intent of the searcher. If you want to get the most out of your on page SEO practices, then you need to fixate on the needs of the searcher.

This means, optimising your content, using images, keywords and backlines, all of which, should be in line with the searcher’s intent, so that you rank appropriately. You want a website that looks nice, that is very informative and is easy to navigate through.

Websites with high quality content are able to drive the most amount of traffic to their sites, this means more visitors which should result in more conversions. You want your content to be attention grabbing, so that it captivates your audience. Make sure your site content is very easy to read, as that’s always preferable.

To do that, you need to relax, and be a little informative at times, and also to think about the searchers intent. Having these things in place, won’t give you the instant results that you might expect, but in the long term, you will start to see the benefits.

2. Optimise Your Meta Titles and Descriptions

Meta tags, from the very beginning have always had their role to play in the SEO space. However, today, the keyword tag isn’t nearly as important today, with more emphasises directed towards the description and title. This is because, it’s these two elements that the searcher is likely to see in the results page.

Just make a simple query in Google. Then take a peek at the description and title of the results page. It’s more than likely this information was taken from the Meta data of those pages.

Not only does optimising your Meta tags for human visitors show your intent, it also lets the search engines know what your page is actually about.

When structuring your content, try to go with descriptions that are informative and titles that make you want to click on them. This way you can ensure you’ll both grab the attention of the search and also entice them to click.

Some experts also recommend you include your main target keyword in the Meta description, as this will make the content appear more relevant, when it’s highlighted after a search query.

3. Long Tail Keywords

With each new iteration of Google, new advancements are introduced. Now, Google is able to know, that if an individual is searching for the right TV, there are many associated keywords attached to that. For this reason, you may want to include additional keywords that relate to the target term.

One thing that is undeniable, is that shorter keywords have more competition, however, long-tail keywords, that is, keywords that consist of more than three words, are much easier to rank for, and more focused.

If you haven’t already, you should consider targeting more long-tail keywords, as your strategy for this year. As this can make it much easier to optimise much of your content. If you want your long-tail keyword content to rank, then it must be high quality – which is something we’ve already spoken about.

4. Optimise Site Speed

Google keeps everything under lock and key, that is, what they use to rank the various pages on their site. So when they do decide to mention a ranking signal, then you might want to listen. Site loading speed is one ranking factor that they’ve let the whole world know about.

For this reason, it’s definitely in your best interest to make your site load as fast as possible. There are many benchmark tests that you can use to test how fast your website is. This way, you’ll have a better understanding of where you are.

Here are a number of things you can do to improve the speed of your site:

• Use Lazy Loading

  When implemented, it can make your site load faster by up to 50%. It does this by only loading images when they are required. So when scrolling down your page, images will load on the fly.

• Use CDNs

  CDNs are basically used to serve your media files, whether it be videos images etc., so that your site doesn’t have to.

• Compress Images

  This is probably one of the more significant ones. The size of your images, tend to make up the vast majority of your pages overall size. Which is why, shrinking your image sizes can have a huge impact on site speed.

• Use Lightweight Themes

  Bigger themes, busier themes, themes that have a lot of things happening on them, can make things run considerable slower. This is why it’s in your best interest to switch to a more streamlined one.

5. Link Internally

Backlinks are just one of many types of connections for you to think about. Linking internally is also very important, as it lets the search engines know the relation between the various pages on your site.

However, when linking, just with backlinks, you have to ensure that the internal links are relevant to one another. You want to link to pages that expand on things you’ve mentioned on another page.

When done correctly, you can create a web of content, all connected to each other via internal links. The primary objective is to provide additional information that would interest the reader, expanding his/her knowledge on a particular topic.

When creating your links, try not to overdo things. It’s very easy for you to saturate your content with links that point everywhere. Ultimately, this can have a negative impact on your SEO. If you want to expand on things touched on, on a particular page, then make a new article, and link to it.

Any and all integrations need to be easily understood by the reader. If the reader is unable to understand it, then the search engine bots will have the same problems. And this, will affect negatively on your SEO.

AUTHOR

Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk.