Introduction
Search Engine Optimization is a long-term, continually evolving strategy to drive organic traffic to your website. Although SEO is a highly effective online marketing strategy, website owners might find it difficult to optimize their site to make it more visible, drive more traffic, and convert prospects into customers.
If you don’t know where to start with SEO, please read below Smarketors 20 perfect SEO tips you must implement in 2021.
1. Invest in a site audit
Begin SEO optimization with a comprehensive site audit. Find out where exactly your site needs to improve in terms of user experience and overall performance. You can use site audit tools to find your site’s shortcomings. If you are new to this, hire a professional SEO specialist to get the job done. The audit will also help you include the SEO best practices to improve your site’s functionality.
2. Analyze competitors
Competitor analysis helps keep the site competent. An extensive competitor website analysis gives you an answer to the question – ‘why is my site not ranking higher?’ You will know why they are successful with their search rankings, social media, backlink generation, content production, traffic, and more. Go head to head with them on every aspect of your online presence.
3. Optimize for search intent
Search intent optimization is what we call optimizing for the target audience. In other words, you will be optimizing the site to help your target audience get answers to their question in the quickest way possible. The faster your content answers their questions, the higher the chances they will convert for your business instead of bouncing and landing on your competitor’s site.
4. Check URL structure
Always create short and descriptive URLs. Although a part of on-page SEO, URL structure is relatively easy to modify. Make sure you use your primary target keywords in the URLs. The structure should be easy to understand for the human eye and help readers understand what the page is all about. Most importantly, keep the URL short (around 60 characters) because most search engines can’t process longer URLs.
5. Optimize for featured snippets
‘Featured snippets’ is the search engine ‘real estate’ you should aim to procure, especially for your primary target keywords. It’s a highly sought-after spot as these are ranked at the very top of organic search results. Be prepared to experience a huge influx of visitors as featured snippets help answer questions on the SERP itself.
6. Nail title and meta description
The page title and meta description are two essential HTML components you should optimize with target keywords. You can edit them in WordPress while posting a piece of content. A meta description is visible on the search engine results whenever your website ranks for a particular keyword. Keep your meta-game strong as it helps users decide if they should click on your website link or not.
Or download Yoast SEO as a WordPress plugin to help easily edit your meta description and title.
7. Add internal and external links
Want to increase visitor sessions on your website? Use internal links in your posts. These links direct readers to pages on your site. Hence they will engage with your website for longer. External links are also helpful to your site only when you use links to high-authority websites or high-quality content. Make sure you add these links strategically on your pages.
8. Check page word count
Content word count matters. One should always look to create a comprehensive post for any target keyword. The idea is to provide readers a one-stop-shop to get answers to all their questions. Indeed, you will want to answer the main question at the beginning of the post. But, you can dive deeper into the question and answer related questions in the rest of the post.
9. Evergreen content ranks forever
Want an inbound marketing secret that works? Create evergreen content! What’s evergreen content? Such content cover topics that will be relevant for years to come. In other words, evergreen content will stand the test of time and you will keep getting more and more traffic. However, evergreen content isn’t created on topics that are seasonal or are susceptible to change.
10. Ensure On-page SEO
Follow a simple on-page SEO checklist to improve your site’s optimization. You should aim at improving key elements like URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, structured data, headers, and more. On-page SEO essentially helps websites stand out in searches.
11. Post content on relevant keywords
Keywords are the most important part of any SEO strategy since you optimize a site using them. Since keywords make the core of an SEO strategy, we highly recommend you conduct extensive keyword research. More importantly, you are looking for primary and secondary keywords. Use primary keywords as the focus of your content while using secondary keywords to support them. Both these keywords will help improve your SERP ranking.
12. Generate high-quality backlinks
Get backlinks from high-authority websites. Backlinks, especially follow links, are critical to your site’s search engine ranking. Backlinking is essentially a sign that your site has valuable content. When other websites link to your content, you gain backlinks. Therefore, the more backlinks you get from high-authority sites, the higher your chances are to rank on SERP. You can even write guest posts on these high-authority sites to get a backlink!
13. Structure content for SEO
Every page on your site should have a format suitable for search engines. An effective format allows the page to be easier to understand and search engine friendly. Make sure you use headings and subheadings throughout the content to help search engines understand the page better. Also, keep the sentences and paragraphs short.
14. Boost page load speed
Be tunnel-visioned when it comes to boosting your site’s loading speed. Anything that makes your site load slowly needs to be eliminated. Websites with high load time also have higher bounce rates. Take the help of Google PageSpeed Insights to figure out ways you can improve site speed. A site audit will help you eliminate unnecessary elements or plugins that are dragging down the load speed.
15. Effective image optimization
We highly recommend you optimize the images on your site. You can do that by adding your target keywords to the “ALT text” on all of your images. Similarly, optimize the image caption and description as well. However, make sure you upload images in JPG format and compress their size. This will help the site load quickly. Moreover, add a link to your graphics if you intend to let others use them freely.
16. Post original content only
Google hates duplicate content. It has intelligent search algorithms that can detect if a site uses duplicate content. Once caught, it will penalize your site by pushing it further down the rankings. Create unique content only. Publish highly researched content and give credits wherever necessary. Such content gains the maximum backlinks.
17. Measure website performance
Track and measure website performance. You should know which parts of the site are performing best and worse. Use Google Analytics to check the content that is making the most buzz on your site. Set the performance metrics you want to track. We suggest you review the site performance consistently and optimize your site accordingly.
18. Use videos in your content
We have already discussed how content impacts SEO. Video is one of the most consumed content types on the Internet. People love watching videos as it is evidence of quality content. As more and more visitors consume and share your videos, search engines will get signals that your website is performing well and should be ranked.
19. Optimize for voice search
Voice search is becoming popular as more and more voice-driven products flood the market. Voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant can help users create voice searches. Since more than 111.8 million internet users use voice search every day in the US alone, it makes sense to invest in voice search optimization.
20. Never stop learning SEO
Search engine optimization isn’t a one-time thing. You will always have to look for the slightest opportunity to improve your site’s performance and gain an edge over your competitors. Moreover, search engine algorithms keep updating every year. So, we suggest you stay updated with all of SEO. Be in the know!
Conclusion
Indeed, SEO demands excellent skills and experience. But, you can implement almost all of the 20 perfect SEO tips mentioned above without prior knowledge and still push your site in the right direction. We genuinely believe that SEO can single-handedly help your site perform better than most of your competitors. So, don’t hesitate before hiring an SEO expert to optimize your site and boost its search ranking.
The Smarketors team always has their ears to the ground to keep current with any Google Algorithm updates that may affect your ranking. Check out our SEO Service page for more information!