Search engine optimization — more commonly called SEO. It’s this nebulous concept that a lot of people understandably don’t get… and yet, your website can’t survive without it. In this blog, I’m going to share some of my best SEO tips to help you climb the ranks of search engine results pages (SERPs). This will improve the organic traffic to your website and get your company in front of more eyeballs.
3 Big SEO Tips to Dominate the SERPs
SEO refers to certain things a website does in order to get more organic traffic and show up higher and more frequently in search engines. Let’s get into some of the nitty gritty! Keep scrolling for some of my best SEO tips.
1. Optimize the Content on the Page
First, let’s talk about your on-page SEO. This refers to the optimization of the content on your site — the stuff that website visitors can see and read. This is where relevant keywords play a big role.
The goal is to optimize each page on your website around a specific keyword so that search engines (mainly Google) will rank it for that keyword. For instance, if you want a blog to rank for “sustainable products,” you want to use that target keyword in a few important places, including:
- The page title/H1.
- The URL.
- The meta title.
- The meta description.
- The first paragraph.
- An alt text for an image.
- Throughout the body of the blog.
These are some of the more prominent areas that search engines are looking at.
How do you find relevant target keywords, you’re wondering? Well, that’s the tricky part. There are endless resources on YouTube and Google explaining different ways to do keyword research. There are also many different software that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
My suggestion is to take baby steps. One tool that’ll help you start to understand keyword research is Keywords Everywhere. This is a great keyword resource, especially if you’re just starting to build your SEO knowledge and need help getting more traffic to your site!
2. Mind Your Technical SEO
Next on my list of SEO tips… get comfortable with technical SEO. Let me back up.
In addition to on-page SEO, there’s also technical SEO. This refers more to the inner workings of your website’s optimization. But in this case, we aren’t always talking about a target keyword. Technical SEO can include the following:
- Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly.
- Locating and fixing crawl errors.
- Fixing broken links.
- Adding structured data.
- Improving your site speed (which is one of the core web vitals), if need be.
Google cares about your technical SEO because it greatly impacts the users’ experience. For example, if your site is really slow, this makes for a poor user experience. So, Google isn’t going to rank you as high or bring you as much organic traffic.
Or, if I had a bunch of broken links in this blog post, this would be frustrating for users. Thus, the search engines wouldn’t like me very much, and you’d probably never see me in search results.
Note that on-page SEO and technical SEO are two different fields. If you’re looking to hire a search engine optimization pro — whether in-house or contracted — understand what kind of SEO help you need.
3. Build Your Link Architecture
Link building is another important ranking factor that Google is paying attention to.
There are two types of links I want to talk about: internal links and external links. Internal links point to another page on the same website. For instance, if — in this blog post — I link to another blog post I wrote, that’s an internal link.
An external link takes site visitors to another site. If I link to something Neil Patel — an SEO guru — wrote, that’s an external link.
Both are important in order to get your website pages ranking!
Internal linking accomplishes two big things:
- It provides the reader with additional relevant resources.
- Internal links help Google better understand what your content is about and how you want to be ranked.
When it comes to external links, there are two matters to discuss: when your website links to another, and trying to get other websites to link to you.
When it comes to linking out to another website, stick with high-quality, trustworthy, authoritative websites. And getting other sites to link to you? Well, that comes down to creating really good content that other people want to link to.
White Hat vs Black Hat SEO: Know the Difference
You can implement all the SEO tips you want, but if you’re not applying them properly, not only will they yield no results, they could actually hurt your website and knock you down in the search results.
This is the difference between white hat and black hat SEO.
With white hat SEO, in a nutshell, you adhere to Google’s (and other search engines’) best practices for ranking. You follow the rules and don’t try to cut corners or do anything sketchy. Your goal is to create high quality content using proven SEO tactics to improve your Google rankings.
Black hat SEO is the opposite. Basically, you try to trick the search engines into ranking you. For example, some sites practice keyword stuffing, where they cram their keyword onto a page as many times as possible to improve their odds of ranking for that word. This doesn’t work. And worse, Google will penalize you for it.
Another example is buying links to your website to make it look more authoritative. This is something else that Google sees right through, and it should not be a part of your link building strategy.
You will never trick a search engine into ranking your blog post or web page higher. The search engine algorithms are just too savvy for that.
This brings me to my final point.
Ranking in SERPs is a Marathon, Not a Sprint
I know that getting your pages to rank can be slow. Painfully slow. And fine-tuning your SEO strategy can take weeks, months, and years. Even with the very best SEO tips, a lot of trial and error is common.
However, you know what they say: Slow and steady wins the race. When it comes to these SEO tips and improving your keyword rankings, don’t look for overnight results. Your best bet is to zoom out and see how things perform month over month. That’ll give you a more accurate picture and help you understand if your SEO efforts are paying off. Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see how your site is performing.
You can also use a site audit tool to look at your current blog content and web pages and provide suggestions for how you can perform better in organic search. Often times, these tools will often give you keyword ideas, too.
One final reminder: Fluctuations in your rankings are normal and to be expected! If a keyword’s ranking or your organic traffic drops a little bit, don’t panic.
Extreme fluctuations, however, warrant your attention. It could mean that something is wrong, or that Google made a core algorithm update and you might need to make some changes on your end, in terms of your SEO strategy.
If you want more SEO tips, I have a video that goes into a lot more detail. Check it out below and don’t forget to subscribe!
