8 Best Tips to optimize a website for SEO in 2018
How to optimize a website for SEO?
First of all, why do you want to follow these 8 Best Tips to optimize a website for SEO in 2018?
For that, you want to know what SEO is and how relevant, SEO is in current scenario!!!
Remarkable improvements were made to the web world, after the rise of Google and SEO!!! SEO is the only reason; we are blindly trusting on Google for our day-to-day queries!!! Let me make it a little bit broader.
You are hungry, and you need a Pizza. What will be your next step? No doubt, you will just Google It!!! I said it right, isn’t it? You will search in Google about the nearest best Pizzeria and will set out for the place or else place an order online, right?
That is how Google had impacted your life!!! We do really trust the results in the Google Search Engine Result’s Page. But do you have any idea about how those exact results is displayed on the so called SERP aka Search Engine Result’s page?
That is where the importance of SEO starts!!!
SEO is the backbone of the SERP. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the optimization techniques that can be used to improve the search engine rankings of a website in any search engines like Google.
Without webmasters, it will be difficult for a website or web-page to list in the top of the search engine results page.
Do you want to master the tactics of Search Engine Optimization aka SEO? Then grasp these 8 best tips to optimize a website for SEO in 2018.
It has now become easier to do SEO for a website. There were many technology advancements, many analytic tools were discovered so far, and also the mindset of audiences have been changed.
The 8 Best Tips to optimize a website for SEO:
1.Keyword Research
Keyword research is the most important stage in SEO; and, hence it is the first step in SEO. Before getting into the content, we have to first make sure of the niche, and then start exploring keywords. If you start your SEO On page optimization before the Keyword Research, you may fail in generating the results. If you choose a keyword which is not related to your site, and without much search volume or great competition, there is no use for doing SEO for that keyword.
Make sure that your keywords meet the following:
- Niche Specific.
- Low competitive keyword.
- Keyword with more search volume.
- Socially Relevant keyword.
- Long tail keyword.
Choose a keyword with high search volume and low competition; it should be also related to the website.
2.High Quality content
Content is and will always be the king in SEO. Web-pages with lengthy, socially relevant content which is related to the niche can rank well in SERP pages. Short relevant contents can also play well in the game.
A few things to keep in mind:
- Avoid thin pages aka pages with low length contents.
- Make sure the content is above 300 words.
- Only include fresh, quality, socially relevant content and lengthy content.
- Always check spelling & grammar mistakes.
- Avoid contents on outdated topics.
If you follow these tips while writing content for your page, no one can stop your page from performing well in SEO!!!
3.On-Page SEO Optimization
After proper Keyword Research, let us get into the On page SEO section. We have written a fresh, lengthy content on a socially relevant topic which is related to our niche. Let us now check the optimizations techniques we have to use in a page. Without this tip, this article on 8 Best Tips to optimize a website for SEO would be incomplete.
- Try to include focusing keyword in the URL of the page. The URL should be short and user-friendly.
- Use a fresh, catchy & unique title name which includes the focusing keyword and with a length of about 55-60 characters & 512 pixels. The title should be related to the content.
- Make sure the meta description of the page is fresh, attractive & distinctive. It should be relevant to the topic and should be with a length of 155 for blogs & 160 for websites. It should not exceed the limit and should be within 1024 pixels.
- Use the keywords in any of the header tags. The header tag should follow the hierarchy, i.e., h1 comes first, then h2, likewise it should be in the order of h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6.
- Keep in mind that, we should only use one h1 and one h2 tags, or else the bots will be confused.
- Avoid using the same content for title tag, h1 tag and h2 tag.
- Make sure that each of the header tags is unique, attractive, and relevant to the topic.
- Try to include focusing keyword in the first paragraph of the content.
- There should be a keyword density of 0.4%, i.e., 4 keywords should be included in a content with 100 words.
- Make use of images in the websites, and it should be related to the page.
- No alt tag should be missing. You have to ensure that, the focusing keyword is included in at least one alt tag.
- The file name of the image should be SEO & user-friendly and has to be separated by hyphens or underscores.
4. Make your website load faster
Internet & Search Engines brought major advancements in the technology. It made things easier for People. During the primitive stage of Google, when someone perform a search, the search results were send to them via mails; and, it would take around 24 hrs. Could you imagine a world like that now, 24 hours to fetch a result? You don't have that much patience, right?
You won't even wait for a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load; and, how would you wait for 24 hours to fetch a result!!!
Now that the present scenario, and how users behave!!! They will just close those sites which would take more than 3 seconds to load!!! This is the era of 4G and soon 5G will take over. So everyone demands speed, and we have to make our website faster, not slower so that users come, and leave it sooner!!! Making a website load faster is considered to be one of the top tip among the 8 best tips to optimize a website for SEO.
How to make a website faster? It is simple; just remove all those elements that make the site slower... Let us look into some of the ways;
- Optimize the images and serve scaled images for better performance in mobile devices.
- Enable HTTP keep alive headers for faster loading.
- Minify the files like CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc.
- Avoid bad requests by remove broken links or 403/404 errors by redirecting it to correct destinations.
- Enable leverage browser caching, thereby reducing the page load times for frequent website visitors.
- Use a Content Delivery Network for providing same fast web experience for users across the world.
5. Create attractive content for the site
We all live in a busy world; therefore stealing the attention of the online users in this online world is pretty hard. The only way you can make them visit your site, and engage with the page, is by creating attractive & interactive content.
We can use long socially relevant interesting content or short evergreen content aka content that never loses its relevancy.
While writing your content for a website/web-page/blog post, try to highlight the major portions, and also include those important ideas in bullet points.
This practice of structuring your content can ultimately makes those results in the Featured Snippets of the Search Engine Result Pages.
As everyone need fast action, no one will waste their time reading long texts; therefore, to make the content more engaging, add some visual elements like infographics, tables, graphs, images, etc. It can help to make the people stay a little longer on the page.
6. More Internal Links
We all know that external links bring reputation to the site, but what does internal links do? Does it bring any SEO power to your site?
Internal Links are those type of hyperlinks on a webpage which points to another webpage (or resource like images, documents, etc...) within the same domain or website.
Have you watched site links in Search results? Only a perfectly established site architecture can helps to create Site links.
What leads to a great site architecture? A properly done internal links can create a well established site architecture. Let us look into the benefits of internal linking:
- Internal Links helps to easily navigate through a website.
- Helps to pass ranking power or link equity across website.
- Linking internally helps to create information hierarchy for a particular website.
Now let us look at the importance of Internal links in SEO. It plays a major role in crawling.
Google bots always look for fresh, and updated content. Whenever a new page is created, bots will come, and crawl your web page. And you only want to crawl that single page? Don't you want to make your previous contents, crawlable and searchable? To make that possible add links of your previous work in the new page/blog, and these links are nothing but internal links!!!
Internal linking can even make the other informative/relevant pages in the website to rank in the SERPs. Moreover, it can even make the audience engage more with our page. The audience can find more and more useful content by visiting a single page. So, internal linking helps everyone, the site owner, crawling bots and, users.
7. Try to gain Quality Backlinks to your website
This tip seems to be very important tip among the 8 Best Tips to optimize a website for SEO. We know that, bots crawls websites through links. While internal links helps to link between your contents within the websites, External links helps in building authority & trust value for the website.
Externals links are those links on a webpage which points to another webpage from another domain or website; and, whenever there is an incoming link pointing to our webpage from a webpage of different domain or website, it is a Backlink.
Let us look how a backlink will work! Consider there is a external link to webpage of your site from a high authority website.
We all know, high authority sites are the favourites of Google; and whenever a new update is made on those site Google bots will promptly come to crawl the site. If so, the bot will also come across that external link pointing to our website, and the bots will also visit & crawl our Website!!!
When a high authority site is mentioning about your site in their website, Google will also start to think that your site contain some quality content, that's why they linked to your site. Google trust those website, and will also start to trust your website; hence, your reputation and trust value will be raised before Google.
Higher trust value, more reputation, and faster crawling rate are the main advantages of linking to a high authority site. While taking backlinks, remember Google love Quality links. So look for some websites with high Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA), & zero spam score and, then create a backlink from that site...
Keep in mind that, it is better to have a single link from high DA and PA site than 100 links from a low quality site having low DA & PA.
Take a look at some of the off page SEO activities which can helps you to gain Quality Backlinks to your website:
- Article Submission
- Directory Submission
- Blogging
- Question & Answer (QA) Sessions
- Forum Posting
- Social Bookmarking
- Video, Image and PPT submission
- Guest Blogging
- Press Release
- Local Business Listing
8. Maximize shares on Social Medias
In this Digital era, everyone is busy in social medias. Rather than social gathering in real places, everyone is interested in virtual gathering at social medias.
The situation is like, no one can think about a single day without checking their mobiles and social media. Even the network operators started giving abundant data at reasonable prices; hence the usage of social media got increased at a faster rate.
Living in such a socially addicted era, how can someone promote something through conventional methods? No one will bother to check out those newspapers, leaflets or TV which shows the promotional activities of your service. At the same time, the social media, where there are millions of users using it around the globe is the best way to promote anything today.
Likewise, to promote our website or post, nothing can be replaced with Social Media. Social medias helps to promote our website; and helps to gain potential customers and new customers for our company.
Once your webpage is ready, just share it across all the social medias just like Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr etc... It can bring leads for your website.
So, that is about the optimization of a website. Follow these 8 Best Tips to optimize a website for SEO in 2018... If you are still not confident about doing SEO for your site, then it will be better to hire someone from a Best Digital Marketing Company...
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