In retrospect, SEO is simply making your website visible to users and understandable to search engine bots. Though search engines are continuously evolving in sophistication, there is a difference in how they see web pages from humans. Thus, SEO helps these engines figure out what your site is about and its usefulness to users. Furthermore, most search engines use similar algorithms and principles. These are not limited to automated search bots, crawlers, Backlinks, and indexed content, all applying artificial intelligence. So what are the SEO best practices applied for general success? Let’s dive right in, shall we?
Schema markup
A Schema markups tag entities such as products and events in your web pages’ content. Specifically, it helps search engine interpret your content better. Generally, the SEO best practices concerning schema markups involve reviewing available Schemas and picking Schemas applying to your site content. Additionally, consider using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper and testing your markup using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. Furthermore, apply structured markups provided at Schema.org.
Logical Site Structure
Subsequently, it’s important to that all your important pages are reachable from your homepage. Additionally, consider arranging your site in a logical tree-like structure with internal links point directed to relevant pages. Likewise, ensure you have a search box helping visitors discover useful content and avoid any overly long with dynamic characters.
Link Structure
Consequently, Links give automated bots(“crawlers”) access to interconnected documents on the web. Once found, the bots decipher the code and data, providing information for a search query. Hence, imagine billions of pages scanned with microseconds. Similarly, sites linking to yours can weigh in when ranking results for a particular search query, “link popularity”. These are also known as Backlinks. Consider going to Google and typing ‘link:www.your-url.com’. This avails a list of all pages listed within google that link to your site.
XML sitemap & RSS feeds
Firstly, an XML sitemap helps search engine bots discover and index content. While RSS feeds notify search engines about any fresh content added to a site. Often used by people interested in getting updates from particular sources. Specifically, SEO best practices dictate that you use both XML sitemaps and RSS feeds. Particularly, RSS feeds provide all website updates, helping engines keep your content fresher in its index.
Featured snippets
Information-rich snippets are really helpful since engines employ mathematical algorithms to sort the relevance.) A featured snippet is a search result containing a brief answer for the search query. Ironically, voice assistants normally use featured snippets for responding to users queries. Hence, why we consider it an SEO best practice. Additionally, when ranking for featured snippets, identify simple questions you might answer on your website, and provide clear direct answers. Furthermore, do provide additional supporting resources and information like videos, images, charts.
Content Quality
Content is the currency when it comes to SEO best practices. Additionally, having user-generated content is a huge plus but should be free from spam. Furthermore, a smart practice is blocking non-unique/unimportant pages from indexing. Though there is no recommended text content length, the longer it is, the better, as long as it’s relevant. Good content fosters greater engagement and higher click-through thus better rankings, attracted links, shares, and mentions.
Mobile Friendliness
Sadly, if you have a mobile-unfriendly design, Google will fall back on your desktop version to rank your site. Secondly, do avoid non-mobile-friendly technologies like Flash on your website. Flash animation and video may be pretty, but search engines can’t index content embedded within multimedia objects. Furthermore, search engines can’t view text that is presented as images. All in all, ensure your site is mobile friendly and responsive to all devices as part of your SEO best practices. It is SEO 101!
Social media
Google treats social posts which are open for indexing like any other webpages, so the hint here is clear. Consider adopting Facebook Open Graph tags for giving your brand control over messaging when your content is shared on Facebook. These tags enable specification of the title, description, thumbnail image, URL when your page is shared on Facebook. Similarly, Twitter Cards perform similar functions.
Local SEO
Initially, start by optimizing your Google My Business listing. Furthermore, your NAP, correct category, photos, reviews are the priority. If you can consider global SEO, then why not! Global SEO is essentially Local SEO on an international scale.
Keep up with Metrics
SEO best practices are meaningless without measuring metrics and understanding patterns. Measure your pre-optimization and post-optimization site statistics for improvements. Additionally, track metrics such as traffic numbers, sales orders, newsletter subscriptions, membership applications for improvements
Conclusion
I can’t fully exhaust all the tricks in a single post, but this should get you started. I would recommend starting with the Google Webmaster tools as a starting point when it comes to SEO best practices. Webmaster tools are quite flexible and I love the fact that they improve your Google search results for geographic queries. Additionally, they can help Google crawl your site more efficiently. Furthermore, avoid Malware on your site as it creates a bad user experience, and hurts rankings. Lastly do report 404s, which are crawl errors. Otherwise, if you’re looking for help with SEO, we’d be willing to help you if you dropped a message. Cheers.