20 Basic SEO Tips To Get You Started
1. The quality of contentGoogle wants to present regularly published helpful, useful articles videos or other types of media that are popular and well produced and wrote for actual human beings rather than the search engine itself.
Google is moving further towards longer-form content that understands a visitor’s intention as a whole, instead of using keywords based on popular search queries to create content.
2. User experience
Basically, stop worrying about keywords and focus on the user experience. There are many SEO benefits for providing the best possible user experience. You need an easily navigable, clearly searchable site with relevant internal linking and related content. All the stuff that keeps visitors on your webpage and hungry to explore further.
3. Site speed
How quickly your web pages load is increasingly becoming a differentiate for search engines. Google may soon start labeling results that are hosted on Accelerated Mobile Page so this may possibly be the ‘mobilegeddon’ of 2016.
4. Cross-device compatibility
Is your website and its content equally optimized for any given screen size or device? Bear in mind that Google has stated that responsive design is its preferred method of mobile optimization.
5. Internal linking
Internal linking has many advantages: As long as they’re relevant and you use clear anchor text; This can help reduce your bounce rates. It helps to improve your ranking for certain keywords. Googlebots fetch new information on your site will have a better idea of how useful and trustworthy your content is, the more they crawl your internal links.
6. Relevancy
Search engines try to provide the most relevant results to a searcher’s query, whether it’s a simple answer to the question; the answer of which Google will likely provide without you having to leave the SERP to more complicated queries; For instance: a searcher’s location, their search history, time of day/year, etc.
7. Authority
Authority website is a site that is trusted by its users, the industry it operates in, other websites and search engines. Traditionally a link from an authority website is very valuable, as it’s seen as a vote of confidence. The more of these you have, and the higher quality content you produce, the more likely your own site will become an authority too.
8. Meta descriptions and title tags
Having a meta description won’t necessarily improve your ranking on the SERP, but it is something you should definitely use before publishing an article as it can help increase your chances of a searcher clicking on your result.
9. Schema markup
You can make your search results appear more attractive by adding Schema markup to the HTML of your pages. Schema is also the preferred method of markup by most search engines including Google, and it’s fairly straightforward to use. This can help turn your search results into a rich media playground, adding star-ratings, customer ratings, images, and various other bits of helpful info.
10. Alt tagged images
Many people forget to include the alt attribute when they upload images to their content, but this is definitely something you shouldn’t overlook because Google cannot ‘see’ your images, but can ‘read’ the alt text. By describing your image in the alt text as accurately as possible it will increase the chances of your images appearing in Google Image search.
11. Evergreen content
Instead of peppering the internet with a rash of ‘quick win’ news stories with little insight, why not publish more evergreen content. More thoughtful, helpful and practical-advice based articles can lead to huge long-term wins in terms of driving traffic and occupying highly visible positions in the SERPs
12. Domain names
You should use sub-directory root domains instead of sub-domains as this is better for your overall site architecture. You should also stay away from hyphens and alternative Top-level domain names as these are considered spammy. Having a ‘keyword rich’ domain name may lead to closer scrutiny from Google.
13. Headlines and permalinks
The headlines for your articles should be under 55 characters to ensure their complete visibility in SERPs. Make sure they’re snappy, attractive and as descriptive as possible. The permalink, which you can normally alter in your CMS even after it’s been set automatically, doesn’t necessarily have to match the headline exactly.
14. Comments
Do not turn off comments system. Having a thriving community of regular commenters engaging in dialogue under your posts shows that visitors care enough about your content to either make their own relevant points or to praise it or to ruthlessly eviscerate it. Just be mindful about filtering out spam comments, or immediately removing any that slip through.
15. Local SEO
Increasingly Google is serving results to users based on their location. This is particularly important to businesses out there in the real world who ned to catch a searcher’s attention just at the right moment, i.e. while walking down the street, on their mobile and looking for somewhere to eat.
16. Social
The most obvious way that you can raise your site’s visibility through non-technical SEO means is of course through social media marketing. You need to make sure you’re present on all relevant social channels and not just broadcasting your content in a faceless manner, but by using it as a customer service channel and genuinely interacting with people in a friendly, helpful and entertaining manner.
17. Hidden text and links
There are a ways to manipulate rankings that a user may not ever see, but Google will probably find and punish you for. Stay away from using white text on a white background, positioning text off-screen, setting font size to zero or hiding a link in a single character like a comma or a full-stop.
18. Duplicated content
If Google finds two identical pieces of content, whether on your own site, or on another you’re not even aware of, it will only index one of those pages. You should be aware of scraper sites, stealing your content automatically and republishing as your own.
19. Link buying or excessive link exchanging
The most valuable links to your site are the ones that come from authority sites within your own niche. don't buy links or exchange too much Google will penalty your site even blacklist you from search engine.
20. Annoying ads
Anything overly intrusive that destroys the pleasure of reading your content and slows down your site speed.
