Do you want to outrank your competitors? But struggling with low traffic? You're not alone. In this situation, the right thing for you is to implement the best SEO practices.
So, today, I’ll share the 10 SEO best practices based on my experience in website optimization. These powerful practices will help you boost your brand awareness and increase organic traffic.
What are SEO Best Practices?
SEO best practices are methods that you can use to improve your website's ranking in search engines. This includes optimizing your site, researching the right keywords, and building links that point back to your site. Starting with these basic strategies helps make your website more visible and brings in more visitors without paying for ads.
Once you've got these fundamentals down, you can move on to more advanced SEO techniques to boost your ranking even further. This solid foundation is essential for growing your site's presence on search engines.
10 Best SEO Practices to Follow in 2024
Following the right SEO practices is essential to boost your website's visibility and ranking. With that in mind, here are the 10 best SEO practices to keep your site at the forefront in 2024.
1. Create Content that Matches the Search Intent
When it comes to creating useful content, you need to understand what users are looking for. Once you grasp their search intent, ensure that your content delivers that information clearly. This approach involves recognizing the four main types of search intent. Each requires a different approach.
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Informational Intent: Users are searching for a particular information. Here, you should create valuable content that answers their questions and solves their problems.
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Navigational Intent: Users want to reach a particular website or page. If your site is what they're looking for, make sure your content helps them get there quickly and easily.
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Transactional Intent: Users wants to make a purchase or perform another specific transaction. Here, your content should guide them smoothly through the buying process, making it as easy as possible.
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Commercial Investigation: Users are looking to purchase and comparing options. Here, you should provide them with comparative insights or helpful buying guides.
Let’s understand it with an example: When someone searches for "buy a website domain," they have transactional intent and expect to see purchase options and domain registration services like GoDaddy or Hostinger.
On the other hand, a query like "how to create a website with AI" indicates informational intent, calling for educational content, step-by-step guides, or video tutorials to help users start building their website.
Additionally, addressing search intent is about more than content creation, it's also about choosing the right format and angle to truly engage and inform your audience.
2. Strategically Use Primary Keywords
Primary keywords are important for attracting the right audience to your content. Take the keyword "how to get backlinks," for example.
It's a popular term with Keyword Difficulty (KD) score of 73 and attracts monthly searches about 1,100. This means it's not easy to rank for, but it's worthwhile because many people are searching for it.
For example, if you're writing an article that uses this keyword, you would want to include helpful, practical advice about earning backlinks. This approach not only targets the keyword but also provides valuable content, boosting your website's visibility and increasing traffic.
Related Reads:
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Get answers to 60+ Important SEO questions
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Stay updated with the latest seo trends
3. Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Optimizing your titles and meta descriptions are important to get more people to see your website in search results. These parts of your website are important because they're often the first thing someone sees about your page.
Tips to Optimize the Title Tags
Here are some helpful tips to optimize your title tags:
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Keep them short, about 50-60 characters, so they don't get cut off.
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Put your main keyword at the start to show it's relevant.
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Make sure each title is different from others.
Related Read:
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Explore the Best AI Title Generators
Ways to Optimize Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are short descriptions under the titles in search results. To improve meta descriptions:
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Keep them under 155 characters to fit well in the search results.
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Use phrases like "Learn more" or "Free shipping" to get clicks.
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Clearly state the benefits, like special offers or useful guides.
Now, If you are searching for the easiest way to optimize your title and meta tags, Give Dorik AI a try. It's the best AI website builder in the market that lets you customize your Titles and meta descriptions at ease.
Dorik AI quickly updates these crucial elements to boost your site's SEO. Its user-friendly interface ensures your tags will be effective and engaging. This will significantly improve your website's ranking and drive more traffic.
4. Write Unique and Useful Content
To rank well on Google and capture your audience's attention, it's essential to produce content that not only stands out but also provides real value. Here are some great strategies to create useful content:
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Expert Insight: Ensure content is crafted or reviewed by experts to enhance credibility.
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Stick to Your Strengths: Focus on topics you or your brand are experts in to establish authority.
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Ensure Accuracy: Verify all facts and data to maintain current and accurate information.
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Proofread: Keep your content free from spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors.
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Use Visuals: Use charts, images, and videos to clarify and engage.
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Organize Your Content: Organize content with subheadings and bullet points for easy readability.
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SEO Optimization: Use SEO best practices such as including relevant keywords and optimizing images.
As you know, content is king, and optimizing it is essential. To learn how to optimize your content effectively, check out our insightful blog on content optimization.
5. Optimize Your Images
Optimizing your images is important for faster loading times and better SEO, aligning with Google image SEO best practices. Here’s a quick guide to make your images work harder for your site:
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Choose the Right Format: Use JPEG for photos and PNG for graphics with limited colors. Use WebP for high-quality and small file sizes.
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Compress Images: Lower file sizes with tools like Adobe Photoshop or TinyPNG to speed up loading without losing quality.
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Descriptive Filenames: Make sure to give your files clear and relevant names so that search engines can understand and index them more effectively.
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Use Alt Text: Include alt text for each image. This makes it easier for people with visual impairments to access the content and boosts SEO as search engines read this text.
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Responsive Images: Make sure your images look good on any device by using responsive design, adjusting image sizes based on the device viewing them.
If you're looking for AI tools to create stunning images, check out our blog post that lists the best tools to generate AI image.
6. Improve Site’s Loading Speed
Improving your site's loading speed is essential since it's a major ranking factor for Google, particularly for mobile searches. Here’s how to get your website to load faster, enhancing both user experience and SEO:
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Benchmark Your Speed: Start by checking your current site speed with Google's PageSpeed Insights tool. This gives you a clear starting point and specific advice from Google on what to improve.
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Compress Images: Since images often consume a lot of data, use tools like Kraken.io to reduce their file size without losing quality. This can significantly cut down loading times.
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Implement Lazy Loading: Lazy loading defers the loading of images until they are needed as users scroll, which can improve initial load times by up to 50%. Keep in mind, this might affect user experience as images will load on-demand rather than all at once.
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Use a CDN: A Content Delivery Network (CDN) stores copies of your site's media on servers around the world. This means your content is delivered from a server nearest to each user, speeding up load times.
If you want a user-friendly website that loads fast, look no further than Dorik. With lightweight, optimized templates and efficient code, Dorik ensures your site loads quickly. Plus, built-in image optimization and fast hosting keep everything running smoothly.
7. Optimize URLs
Optimizing your URLs is the first step to give your users a great experience and improve SEO, so here's how to create URLs that are both user-friendly and search engine-friendly:
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Keep URLs Short: Shorter URLs tend to perform better in search engine results pages (SERPs). A study by Backlinko supports this, showing that concise URLs often rank higher.
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Include Keywords: Always use your target keywords into your URLs. This helps improve your content’s visibility and relevance in search results.
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Use Logical Structure: If your website has multiple categories or layers, use categories or subfolders in your URLs. For instance, if you have an online store, you might include a “/shop/” subfolder to help users navigate your site more easily. Use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) to separate words.
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Make URLs Readable: A well-crafted URL should give a clear idea of what the page is about. Avoid long, confusing URLs that can deter users and complicate sharing. Aim for clarity and simplicity. Avoid full sentences, mixed cases, spaces, special characters, and unnecessary numbers.
8. Optimize Your Site with Effective Internal Linking
Optimizing your site with effective internal linking is a simple but powerful SEO technique. Here’s how to do it right:
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Use Keyword-Rich Anchor Text: Choose anchor texts that include your main keywords. This helps Google understand what the linked pages are about, improving your SEO.
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Direct Authority to Low-Authority Pages: Link from your established pages to newer or less visited pages. This transfers some of the existing page's authority to those that need more visibility and can help boost their rankings.
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Keep It Simple: Don’t overcomplicate internal linking. A practical approach is to link from older, more authoritative pages to newer pages. This leverages the established authority to help newer content perform better.
9. Build High Quality Backlinks
High-quality backlinks are important for boosting your website's search engine ranking. Here's a how you can do it effectively:
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Understand the Value of Backlinks: Think of backlinks as votes of confidence from other websites. When a webpage has lots of high-quality backlinks, it's more likely to achieve a higher position on search engine results pages (SERPs).
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Aim for Quality Over Quantity: Not all backlinks are beneficial. Focus on obtaining high-quality backlinks.
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Analyze Competitor Strategies: Study the backlink strategies of your top-performing competitors. Look at their content’s topics, style, length, and use of visuals to identify what earns them high-quality backlinks.
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Replicate and Improve: Learn from your competitors' best content, then make something similar but even better, ensuring it still sounds like your brand.
10. Provide Good User Experience
Improving your site's user experience (UX) is crucial for both keeping visitors happy and boosting your SEO. Here's why and how good UX makes a difference:
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Reduce Pogo Sticking: Google notices if visitors quickly leave your site to return to search results, a behavior known as "pogo sticking." This can signal to Google that your site might not be providing what searchers are looking for, potentially lowering your rankings.
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Monitor Bounce Rates: High bounce rates on Google Analytics can indicate that users aren’t finding what they expect on your pages. This is a useful indicator that your UX might need improvements.
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Encourage Shares and Links: A user-friendly site is more likely to be shared and linked to by visitors. Simple navigation, minimal pop-ups, and working links all contribute to a better user experience.
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Focus on User-Friendly Design: Ensure your site is easy to use. Avoid elements that can frustrate visitors, like intrusive ads or complicated layouts.
FAQs on SEO Best Practices, Answered
1. What are backlinks in SEO?
Backlinks are links from one website to another. They are important for SEO because they act like recommendations. When reliable sites link to yours, it signals the search engine that your website is trustworthy. This can improve your site's visibility and increase traffic.
2. What is the SEO first approach?
The SEO-first approach means prioritizing search engine optimization from the start when building a website. This strategy ensures that every part of the site, like its layout, content, and technical setup, is designed to perform well in search results. By focusing on SEO early, your website can attract more visitors and offer a better user experience.
3. What are 3 main areas of SEO?
The three main areas of SEO are Content, Technical, and Links. Technical SEO improves your website's structure so search engines can easily understand and index it. Content SEO focuses on creating and optimizing quality content that targets your audience's needs and keywords. Link Building is about obtaining links from other websites, boosting your site's authority and ranking. which boosts your site's authority and ranking in search results. Focusing on these areas helps your website perform well in SEO.
Your Turn to Boost SEO!
Now it's your turn to boost your SEO. Just use these simple tips to make your website better and watch your rankings improve. Remember, SEO takes continuous effort, so keep adjusting and improving. Start today and see how your site does.
