6 Best Practices for Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quantity and quality of website traffic to a web page or website from a search engine. According to Hubspot, 75% of searchers never go past one page of search results – making it essential to rank on the first page of Google. Follow these 6 tips to improve your website or web page traffic:

 

1. Align Your Content with Search Intent

The ultimate priority of Google is understanding and satisfying every search intent. When trying to rank on Google’s first search page, it is essential to understand the concept of search intent and create content on your website that aligns with it. Four common types of search intent include:

1. Informational: A search falls into this category when a user is looking for specific information.
2. Navigational: A search would fall into this category when the searcher is looking for a specific website or app.
3. Commercial: This type of search intent happens when the user is looking for a specific product, but the user has not yet made their final decision.
4. Transactional: This type of search intent happens when a searcher has made the decision to buy a specific product.

When creating content for your website, keeping search intent and your target audience in mind are essential SEO best practices to follow. When creating your content, it is essential to keep both of these things in mind.

 

2. Target a Variety of High- and Low-Volume Keywords

Some of the most essential aspects of creating content are ensuring it aligns with the company’s values, is well researched, and answers the intended audience’s questions. So it is crucial to choose keywords that fall into all of these categories.

Keywords or key phrases are terms added to online content, such as websites and blogs, to improve search engine rankings for the terms used. Most keywords will be chosen during the keyword research phase process. These words and phrases are often chosen based on a combination of factors, including search volume, competition, and commercial intent.

When a website’s content is optimized around keywords and phrases that people typically search for, the website has a better chance of having a higher rank. In fact, SEO is pretty much impossible without keywords. It is crucial to target and use keywords that span an entire buyer’s journey. This should be done by using a variety of low- and high-volume keywords.

Early-interest keywords tend to be high volume, because the audience has not yet been narrowed down. Late-interest and purchase-ready keywords are often lower in volume, because the audience has been narrowed down to a specific group. While it might be more inviting to use high-volume keywords because of the great deal of traffic they bring in, content creators should not be afraid to use low-volume keywords if they believe these words will turn website traffic into leads or even customers.

Think of the goal of your content when choosing keywords. If you are looking to have high traffic, use high-volume keywords and if you are looking for more customers and leads, think about using more low-volume keywords.

 

3. Use Image Alt Text

It is impossible for search engine crawlers that scan sites to understand images that do not have alt text descriptions. For this reason, it is a significant priority for SEO to add these descriptions to your images.

Without alt texts, bots will strike against your website or page because they can not understand what is on it. Alt-text is also a best practice for creating an accessible website. By having image alt text, you give your site page an advantage in ranking in image-based Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). All alt text must be descriptive, contextually relevant to the content on the page, and short.

 

4. Implement a Historical Optimization Strategy

In 2015, HubSpot found that most of their organic blog traffic came from posts that had been published months before. They found that 76% of their monthly blog views came from these old posts. Today, around 89% of HubSpot’s monthly blog views come from posts published six months prior. So they decided to create a strategy to refresh and republish their past posts to match where the company is today.

By refreshing and reposting old posts with already high traffic, companies can build upon the current value of the post and engagement in hopes of doubling and, in some cases, tripling the traffic on the new posts. This process also helps optimize blogs because it decreases the need for content and simultaneously increases organic traffic.

However, this process is not for everyone. This strategy is catered towards blogs and sites that:

• Generate a significant amount of organic traffic
• Have a considerable amount of subscribers
• Have social media followers that can supply a surge of traffic, shares, and backlinks to updates
• Have a substantial repository of old content that is worth refreshing and republishing

If you have all or almost all of these four things, it is recommended that you implement a historical optimization strategy. It will not only help you save time creating utterly new content, but it will also bring in more traffic to your blog or site.

 

5. Publish Long-Form Content

Several studies have proven that long-form content ranks better on Google. One key finding shows that long-form articles containing 3,000 or more words get 3x more traffic, 3.5x more backlinks, and 4x more shares. This demonstrates there is a strong collaboration between content length and search performance.

According to Google, it is essential to focus on the needs of the user and those needs  should be put before SEO. That does not mean SEO is unnecessary, because we certainly all know that it is an essential aspect of the success of a website or web page. When creating long-form content on your blog or website, it is crucial to target keywords that allow for a good balance between the difficulty of keyword and search volume.

 

6. Optimize Your Page Speed

No one wants a frustrated user. If your site takes too long to load, you will frustrate users, which can lead to a drop in your rankings on Google, and we have already learned the importance of having a first-page ranking.

There are free tools you can use to check your page speed, such as Google-owned PageSpeed Insights. What better way to see what Google wants from your website than using a Google product to analyze it.

There are a few quick and easy ways to improve page speed, including:

• Compressing images
• Enabling browser caching
• Deleting unnecessary plugins
• Reducing server response time
• Reducing the number of redirects
• Minifying CSS and JavaScript files

There are many other ways to improve page speed; some are more labor-intensive than others. However, it is a necessary investment to ensure healthy website traffic.

 

SEO is a challenging topic, especially because it is ever-changing. There are many ways to improve the quality and quantity of a website. These 6 best practices offer a few ways to improve. Need help optimizing your website? ColinKurtis can help! Contact us now and let’s get started on improving your ratings.