Guide for Enhancing Your Website for Search Engines and Boost Traffic:

Who’s this SEO guide for?

Do you own a website, run an eCommerce or are you looking for plans to promote online content marketing through Google Search results pages? Then the best thing you can do is read this guide. This guide to SEO will help you understand the mechanics of search engines and create an effective online advertising strategy.

Maybe you are also a freelance SEO consultant working in an agency: Then this SEO Beginners Guide is for you. If you are focused on providing yourself with the best information on how SEO works and how to execute a Search Engine Marketing strategy with the best SEO best practices, you need beginner guides like this one.

After reading this guide, you won’t be an SEO guru who can promise an instant ranking on SERPs number-one position (unfortunately). Better yet, you’ll finish this guide and take away a solid understanding of the SEO basics described below to help search engines understand, crawl, render, and index your web pages in the best possible way.

SEO Definition and Methodology

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility and ranking of a website or web page in search engine results pages (SERPs). These adjustments and settings, when considered individually, can seem overwhelming because they are numerous.

But having a methodology for implementing them, all have a positive impact on your company’s performance online. This also leads to a better user experience and more visibility in the major search engines on the internet.

Some of the topics in the SEO Starter Guide are common knowledge, and you may be familiar with some of them. But the importance of this guide to SEO is to help you get the most out of these topics.

If you have an online business that revolves around one main goal, helping your audience, then your optimization tasks should improve the user experience.

The crawler algorithm of Google is one of those users. It is your most important user when it comes to driving more organic search traffic to your website because Google’s crawler also helps human users find your content.

What is the SEO Main Goal?

The main goal of SEO is to present your content optimized for search crawlers so they can easily interpret your content and present it on their search results pages. Regardless of the size of your website, the optimization topics we will cover are designed to be applied to any size website.

We hope this Guide to SEO helps you improve your SEO search engine skills and increase your website’s visibility on SERPs (Search Engine Resul Pages). We want to read your feedback and questions in the comments sections below.

Enjoy your reading!

Understanding the Fundament of SEO

These terms are important that you know them because we will be using them in the guide:

• SEO: preparing your website to be understood by all search engines. You can also be referred to as a person and SEO type or SEO specialist.
• Search Engine Bot – These are common names given to search crawler algorithms.
• Crawler – This is the software that runs all over the internet and picks up web pages to add to its index.
• Crawl – This describes what the crawler does. It looks for new web pages or changes to existing web pages. This process uses the links within those web pages to discover other pages on a website or linked from one website to another.
• Index – search engines register web pages in databases by describing what content a web page has and its URL. Indexing is the process of retrieving, reading and storing a website page in a search engine index database. This process can go on all day across billions of web pages.

Is your website indexed by Google search page?

You can use this search operator to find out if your website is indexed by Google: site:yoursite.com. A quick test like this will help you: site:speed.cy, then check the results.

Can’t find your website in Google’s index? In that case, keep in mind that if your site is new, you’ll have to wait a few days for it to be crawled by a search engine bot. The tips listed below will help you get your website in the index faster:

• Create social media accounts and link them to your main website
• Create a Google My Business account and syndicate a post or page from your website there
• Avoid a website design that makes it difficult for crawlers to find all your website URLs
• Use a fast responding hosting server
• Set the right tags in your web pages’ headers so crawlers can index your web pages

Does Your Website Need SEO?

Your website is a great asset to your business, and making the most of it requires many actions. Answering these questions will help you answer the question:

• Is your website receiving organic search traffic?
• How many visitors come to your site?
• Is your website loading fast on mobile devices?
• Are you getting high-quality traffic from search engines?
• How good is your website conversion rate?
• Is your website content relevant to your business model?
• Are your website visitors engaging with your site?
• Does your website’s design match your website’s goals?

Having all these questions answered as a yes, then you already have an SEO strategy running. Meaning that you already discovered the need for your website to have an SEO Expert. If your answer is no, to any of those questions, or all of them, you are on the right page; we will help you start your journey as an SEO expert to help your website get more exposure on search Results Pages.

Why Do you need to learn SEO?

If you’re a webmaster new to SEO, this guide to Search Engine Optimization will explain why and what to improve your SEO skills. An SEO expert should be trained to solve complex issues in a website and help a website get better visibility in all search engines that matter to your business.

Follow this guide to SEO, and you will be learning ways to optimize a website. Additionally, you probably will need to hire an SEO expert to help you boost the process and reach your goal faster. It will be cheaper in the long run.

The decision of hiring an SEO guy is important when you are starting your business. Many parts of a website require certain skills that your business might not want to wait for you to learn. But it does; if your website is just a personal blog with no products to sell, you are good at going by yourself.

But in the opposite scenario, when having a business depending on selling products or services, then you might need us to help you improve things like:

• Adulting your website content or site structure
• Technical SEO audit about your website coding and deployment issues: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, JavaScript and CSS used
• Creating a content marketing strategy
• Managing your online business exposure campaigns
• Keyword research related to your industry
• SEO education for your in-house staff
• Local SEO and backlink management or link building

Being an educated client when looking for an SEO expert’s help will protect you from SEO amateurs. We strongly encourage you to check these Google resources:

• Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web
• Google Webmaster Guidelines

What are the advantages of submitting a sitemap to Google?

Using a sitemap is the best way search engines can discover all the URLs on your website. For Google, you need to use Google Search Console to submit your sitemap URL. Eventually, Google crawl will visit all listed URLs in that sitemap, and by doing it, it will discover many other URLs related to those pages.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a file that you can upload to your website that contains all the pages of your website. The purpose of this file is to provide search engines with an accurate list of all the pages on your website so that they can better index and rank your website.

A sitemap can be two things:

1. A file that provides search engines with information about the webpages, images, videos, and related files representing your site’s structure and internal linking between them.
2. A sitemap can also be a web page containing an XML or HTML format for all the URLs of your website’s images, videos, and webpages.

How you decide to help the search crawler find your content is up to you, but you should use at least one of the two methods described above. In Speed SEO, we recommend using both methods so the crawling of your site with be faster, resulting in faster indexing and processing of your content.

What is the significance of a sitemap on SEO?

A sitemap is an underestimated page for too many website managers. A sitemap reduces the click depth and helps search engines to discover all pages on a website. Sitemaps are to be created on a content type basis, these are some examples of using sitemaps for helping your help your Search Engine Optimization:

• Video sitemap
• Image sitemap
• Regular page sitemap

What should you include in your website’s sitemap?

Include your website sitemap in the “robot.txt” file because that file is the first file search bots will look for. When you provide the sitemap fast, you help the crawlers discover all relevant URLs on your website. These URLs will represent the type of content on your website. Human users can also find your sitemap helpful when they are trying to reach a page.

What is the Robot.txt file?

The Robot.txt file is a text file that tells search engines which pages are allowed to be crawled and indexed on your website. Search engines like Google use the robot.txt file to determine whether or not the requested page exists and should be crawled.

👍 SEO Best Practices

The name of this file must remain “Robot.txt”, be in the root directory and have the correct parameters. Here you have a perfect example of a sitemap file:

# speed.cy/robots.txt
# Here you tell Google's bot not to crawl any URLs in the shopping cart or icons folder, because they won't be useful in Google # Search results.
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /icons/

Not all pages on your website will provide useful content to search results. In those cases, and to save your crawl budget (I will explain later), you should block the search crawlers from crawling them. The same applies to subdomains.

When having different subdomains on your website, each of them needs a separate “Robot.txt file”. Here you can find a Robot.txt Validator and Testing tool for free.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to Avoid:

• Search crawlers should never index pages with thin content.
• Internal search result pages of your site should be blocked from crawlers.
• Dynamic URLs created by the website should also be blocked from crawling.

Important URLs with legal or relevant content marketing should be allowed to be crawled by search engine crawlers.

The “robot.txt” file is the first file the crawlers will try to fetch. This is the main reason to tell the crawlers what to look for and what not to look for.

You block certain pages from search engines crawling bots, which does not mean that the files won’t be rendered or called from internet browsers.

These are two completely different rendering scenarios. One is crawling to determine if your content is a candidate for being presented in the search results. The other is your web visitors’ browsers requesting the files to present to the user on their monitors.

There are also those bad crawlers, the ones you don’t want crawling your website for their intentions are far from being legit. For these rogue internet crawlers, there are other parameters to include in your robot.txt file. Read more about it: How can I control bots, spiders and crawlers?

You should make sure your website is accessible to search engine crawlers and human readers.

When posting content on your site, you must keep two readers in mind; the search crawlers and the human readers. Your web pages should be rendered by these two readers in the same way. Knowing this, you know that your robot.txt file should not block your JavaScript or CSS files from search crawling bots.

Otherwise, human users will see one thing, and search engine bots users will see something else. This will harm your search engine’s organic visibilities and impact your business directly.

👍 SEO Best Practices

In Google Search Console, you will find a URL inspection tool to check how Googlebot renders your web content to identify possible problems and their solutions.

What does your title tag say about your site?

When it comes to content marketing relevancy, your <title> tag is the king. Because it tells users and search engine bots what a particular page on your website is all about.

The title tag (<title>) must be inside the <head> element, preferably at the top of your HTML document, and it should never be a duplicate from another page of your website. for example:

<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<link rel="profile" href="https://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin="">
<title>SPEED SEO - Best Online Marketing Strategy For Businesses</title>

What should you do to ensure that your title is interesting?

The title of your pages is the first opportunity your website has to drive visitors. Having boring titles will not help your website’s performance and search results.

On the other hand, having titles not related to the web page’s content will also hurt your website because search engines will disregard your web content as relevant or poor SEO.

👍 SEO Best Practices

• Focus on providing an accurate description of your website pages in your <title> tags
• Write titles that flow naturally while including your main keywords or key phrases
• Keep the title of your page between 50-60 characters

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

Writing a title with no connection with the content of the page

Use empty titles, vague or a duplicate ones like “Page number”, “no-title”, or “untitled”

Each web page must have its own title

Duplicate titles are a common error on too many websites. Not in the ones we optimize because this is one of the first ranking factors we take care of when we start the SEO task. Also, consider the relevancy of the <title> tag for your mobile version pages.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

Never use one title text for all of your web pages or a group of them. Even when the pages are closely related, if that is the case, then those pages are not providing value to search pages and should be blocked from crawling via the “robot.txt” file.

What is the truth about meta description in SEO?

There is an almost general misconception about the “meta description” tag you will clear out today. The “meta description” is not a ranking factor. But it is an organic search traffic driver factor.

Google and other search engines use this tag to provide the searchers with an excerpt or summary of your content pages displayed on search engine result pages and nothing more.

The relevancy of the meta descriptions comes when your web pages are presented to search engine users. There you have the chance to engage your targeted audience by providing them with normally 130 – 160 characters of information about your page to convince them into clicking.

Having a great title working together with a great meta description, you can surely improve your site CTR and organic traffic.

<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>SPEED SEO - Best Online Marketing Strategy For Businesses</title>
<meta name="description" content="Since 2008, I&#039;ve generated over $14M in revenue for my clients. Let&#039;s talk about getting your business growing with my High-End SEO strategies." />

What are the meta description tags and why is it important for SEO?

The meta descriptions tags are suggestions, not orders that you give to search engines. Sadly, not every time you write a great meta description for a page, that means that Google will use it.

After crawling, indexing, and reading your content, Google bots might decide to use another summary text and use it as the meta description.

Google changing the meta description is because Google needs to relate the meta description displayed in a search results page with the query used by the searcher. Google always tries to match your content with the search intent implicit in a query or key phrase.

👍 SEO Best Practices

Your meta description tag must summarize as precise as possible the content of each page

What is the goal of the meta description tag?

Your meta description tag’s goal is to introduce your content to the searcher in the search result pages and to convince the search to click on your page and not on your competitor’s page. You need to cover these two intentions in a professional and friendly way.

The length of the description tag sometimes varies depending on how good Googlebot engaged with your content page and the relevancy your content represents for a query.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

• Writing a meta description with no relationship with the content of the page.
• Using a different language on the meta description of the language of the page.
• Using generic words or only keywords.
• Copying the text for the meta description from the content of the page.
• Writing a too long meta description.

What is the best way to optimize meta descriptions?

Don’t copy a paragraph from your page and paste it on your “meta description” tag. You can do better than that. Your meta descriptions work for both crawler bots and human users. The meta description is also an opportunity to outrank your competitors by increasing your CTR and boosting the visibility of multiple pages in your domain.

When your site is a small website (a few hundreds of pages), managing the meta description tags are not a big deal. But having a website with several thousand or probably millions of web pages is not wise to do it manually.

In this scenario, tell your developers to prepare the meta description to be generated automatically.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

• Use one meta description text more than once.
• The use of more than one meta description tag.

What are the headings for an SEO marketing strategy?

Your topics need to be introduced to the readers with the right heading tags. Give them meaning to point out relevant topics and to indicate hierarchical order in your text. Using these technics helps readers to follow the main idea of your content marketing.

👍 SEO Best Practices

Motivate the readers to continue reading

Motivate the reader to continue reading the next paragraph with direct and clear heading tags. The sub*headings are used to give also breathing space to the text. Use them wisely. 

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

• One word heading tag for a meaningful next paragraph.
• Using heading tags with no hierarchical order.
• Three heading tags together, in this case, consider bold or <strong>.
• Using sub-heading where it makes no sense.
• Too long heading tags.
• Using heading tags for styling and not for keeping the content structure.

Keeping your website structure user friendly is key

How to create a URL on your website?

Each type of content on your website needs to have an URL. Search engines use them to crawl and understand your website’s structure and afterwards point users to those URLs. A classic example is the images on your website; all of them need to have their URLs.

This also applies to products and changed content.

Here is the anatomy of an URL:

 There are different sections in a URL. for example:

https://speed.cy/top-5-digital-marketing-trends-for-2021

The secure protocol is almost mandatory and needs to have when using the best SEO practices. The hostname is the web domain address of your website; it also represents your website’s IP. At this stage, the DNS setting will resolve or interpret the domain name requested and point it to the web IP address.

There can exist different versions of your web addresses using different types of prefixes.

Variations for a hostname are 5:

1. www.yourdomain.com
2. https://yourdomain.com (secured protocol)
3. http://yourdomain.com (unsecured protocol)
4. https://www.yourdomain.com
5. https://www.yourdomain.com

Normally Google will hide the protocol and prefix to make the URL friendly to the user, for example, speed.cy. But when clicking on the search bar, you can see the full version of the URL is used.

Inside the URL or web address can also be paths to content folders or sub-directories. These sub-directories are organizational and help your website files be organised and help the crawlers find that content.

As the root, Those subdirectories also have file names and extensions to determine precisely which content is called from the hosting server. The URL paths are case sensitive. This means that “CAPITALIZED WORDS” URLs are not the same as “small case” URLs. For example:

“yourdomain.com/SEO-SERVICE” and “yourdomain.com/seo-service.” Here you have two different URLs able to house different content, each of them.

The same applies to the trailing slash at the end of an URL, except for the homepage. For example:

• “Yourdomain.com” can be the same as “yourdomaing.com/”
• “Yourdomain.com/file” is not the same URL as “Yourdomain.com/file/”

👍 SEO Best Practices

Keep your website URLs under 75 characters and easy to remember

One thing that helps your brand gain relevance on the internet: is how well your visitors remember your site. For this reason, your site’s URLs should be easy to remember and type.

Avoid using special characters and double trailing slashes after the hostname. Keep them short and 100% relevant to the content of the page.

👎🏿 SEO (SEO) Practices to avoid:

• Too long URLs
• URLs formed of only numbers
• Double slashes after the hostname
• Irrelevant URLs based on the content of the page
• Using special characters in the URLs
• Repeating the same words too many times in the URL
• Using capital letters

How important is your site navigation for helping your SEO?

It is often overlooked, but site navigation and Search Engine Optimization go hand in hand. The more people can easily find what they are looking for on your website, the better your search engine rankings will be.

What is the role of a page on your site?

The role and importance of a page on your site are determined by the navigation settings. Google and other search engines understand better a website structure by following the navigation structure. Thru the navigation of your website, you tell search engine crawlers which pages you consider important.

Navigation also helps your web visitors to find and reach other pages on your website.

What are the best SEO practices to optimize the homepage?

Your website homepage is the root of all your website pages. It will be probably the most visited page of your website and the first step on your website visitor’s journey. Your homepage should provide fast access to other important pages on your website. for example:

There should be one click from your home page to your about us page, contact us page, products page, sitemap page, and other important pages. Having a website with hundreds of articles and products calls for grouping those pages into categories and subcategories.

Always trying to keep a maximum of 4 clicks, preferably a max of 3 clicks.

What is the impact of click depth on SEO?

Click depth is the number of times the user needs to click to reach a web page on a website. And it has a strong impact on helps your SEO performance.

What are breadcrumbs?

Breadcrumbs help your web visitors go back to the previous page or the homepage/root domain. You can find the breadcrumbs in the top header of a web page or the bottom section of a web page. Googles recommend using structured data markup to help its search engine understand when your website is using breadcrumbs.

👍 SEO Best Practices

Make it easy for visitors to navigate quickly to all your web pages

When the visitors of your website, search engine bots or humans, can find all your pages quickly, you improve the user experience and provide crawlers with a faster way to understand your content. Using link building helps your SEO best practices for your pages to be found.

Internal search features are not a recommended method for your visitors to find your pages. When having a similar topic related to a web page on your website, link to them when it makes sense; by doing this, your website visitors discover those content pages faster.

• Using too many subdirectories to reach important pages for your website.
• Users to click more than 3-4 times to reach any page on your site.
• Forcing your web visitors to use internal search for content.
• Using images or animations for web navigation purposes.
• Using scripts or event-handling as navigation settings.
• Have 3 broken links in your navigation.

What should you do if a visitor lands on pages that you don’t have?

Your website should have an interactive 404 page!

There is no way to avoid web visitors landing on pages you do not even have; for one reason or another, it happens. The opportunity this gives you is to redirect them to related pages so that you do not let the visitor go without having the opportunity to find more content on your website.

When your website settings have a custom 404 page, you can redirect the visitor to a working page. When sending a web visitor from a 404 error page to a 200 code working page, you greatly improve your website user’s experience.

To discover what provoked the visitor to land on a 404 page you can use Google Search Console “Coverage Feature“

• Having a 404 error page is not consistent with your overall website content.
• Not having a 404 error page.
• Allowing your 404 error pages to get indexed by search engines.
• Not allowing Search engine crawlers to discover your 404 error pages.
• Overloading your 404 pages with design. (keep it simple and consistent).

Content is King For SEO

Content is a key component of SEO. It helps to increase your page rank, thus increasing your visibility on search engines like Google and Bing. In order to get more traffic from the search engines, you need to create content that will be relevant and useful to your target audience.

Content is one of the most important aspects of SEO because it helps search engines determine how well optimized a website is for a certain keyword. So, when it comes to SEO, content is king. A good content strategy will help you increase your page rank and get more traffic from the search engines.

How do you create an incentive for the reader to look at your content?

Your website got to be fascinating and helpful!

Give the reader an incentive to look at your content. Creating compelling content is one thing, but creating useful content is another.

Your goal is to have your pages provide users with both. The relevance of your web content alone will have a positive or negative impact, more than any other ranking factor you could read about organic search traffic.

We know good content when we see it; the same goes for crawler bots, but those crawlers are evaluating content. So the first user you need to convince is the human user. But never ignore the algorithm users, because they evaluate the relevance of your content to a search query. Your content offers opportunities that you need to exploit: Articles, social networking services, comments and others.

When your content provokes a positive reaction in your audience, they tell their friends and others. When search engine crawlers find this kind of interaction, users-to-users are promoted by your content quality and relevancy.

The search engine algorithms or crawlers increase your content’s trust level because user engagement is your best ally for Search Engine rankings.

Which keywords would be the most effective for my site on search engines?

Think of search queries or words that a user has to type into the Google search bar to find your content or products. Think of the scenarios where one part of your target audience is familiar with your type of product or service and the other part is not.

Brainstorm with your team writers and try to anticipate these search queries and their different possibilities. Use as many related keywords to a topic as possible. There are several free tools to help you find these keyword variations. For example:

• Google Planner
• keywords everywhere
• Ubersuggest
• Text optimizer

Your best opportunity lies in providing a product or service, that no other site is offering. Writing original and relevant content is great. Avoid using duplicate content at all costs.

👍SEO Best Practices

Readability level plays a role in your text, Keep it easy-to-read

Your content needs to be free of spelling errors, well written, and easy to digest.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

• Filler words, grammatical errors, and no relevance in the text.
• Poorly structured content.
• Using too many texts in images (the spider bots of search engines cannot read that text).
• Broken links in your text.
• Copying your competitor’s text.

Optimize your content topics with clarity

Keep one idea per paragraph. Your visitors will understand better the end and the beginning of your content. Using heading to break your paragraphs into short chunks helps your web visitor navigate through your content and find faster what they are looking for.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

• Too long paragraphs.
• Not using subheadings.
• Ignoring the need for layout separations.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

• Re-using other website content that represents zero value to your audience.
• Keeping a high duplicate content ratio on your website.

Your content is meant for humans first, and search engines second

SEO’s main goal is to expose your content to your audience via search result pages. You need to have content users’ needs, but at the same time, search engines need to understand your web pages to determine if your content deserves a better rank in the SERPs.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

• Considering that keyword stuffing will help you rank better.
• Having thin content pages.
• Allowing search engines to see content that your web visitors cannot see.

How to build trust with your web visitors?

Focus on building up trust in your web visitors. Web users are the ones sending the best ranking signals to SEO. It would be best if you cultivated trust in your web visitors (Including search engine’ spider bots) to keep a good reputation and prove your expertise and trustworthiness in your industry.

The author of your articles should also be declared

Search engines are considering the authorship of content to determine trustworthiness. Your author or authors should meet these criteria to improve the building of trust. When the author is the website or organization, the about us page should be the evidence of the expertise.

👍 SEO Best Practices

• The author should have proven expertise on the subject/topic he or she is writing about
• Have social networks profile validating his background
• A short bio on the user profile page
• A clear picture included at least on the user profile page

 👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

• Leaving a post or article with no authorship.
• Giving too little content that doesn’t cover the goal of a page.
• Using fake user profiles.
• Not having user profile pages per author.

The role of marketing ads in your pages

Probably your website needs to display some advertising banners or text. However, avoid those ads from distracting your web visitors. Distracting your users can lead to losing a sale or not allowing them to consume your website’s content. Keep your ads the necessary and don’t overuse them.

Google ads also impact the loading time of your pages negatively. You need to keep an eye on all types of online advertising you are placing on your web pages.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

• Overloading your pages with advertising.
• Placing ads that might distract your web visitors.
• Using too big file sizes in your ad types or formats.

Protect your website reputation with nofollow

Is your news page receiving too many spam comments? There is where you need to tell search engines that those links are not to receive your pave reputation or as we used to call it, page rank. Setting the “nofollow” and “UGC” tags is the solution

<a href="http://www.yourpage.com" rel="nofollow">The anchor goes here</a>

You can also use:

<a href="http://www.yourpage.com" rel="ugc">The anchor goes here</a>

Having the “leave a comment” form for your articles can easily turn into a nest for spammy content. You need to protect your site against it by adding the “nofollow” or “UGC” tags for them.

The Importance of Internal and External Links for SEO

Always use descriptive anchor texts

Anchor text is the clickable word or words you see on a paragraph that takes you from one page to another web page. This action is also called link building. Backlinking can lead a user to an internal web page or an external web page. Search engines and users consider that the anchor text, also known as link text, links to another page, and is related to the page the user was sent from.

Regardless of the type of link building strategy, internal or external, the more descriptive the text used as an anchor is, the better for your SEO effort. A good anchor text helps users and search engines to understand what the page you are linking to is all about and the relationship between both pages’ content.

Suggested read: Top 5 outdated Search Engine Optimization practises hurting your site

👍 SEO Best Practices

• Always link to internal and external web pages related to your page
• Distribute your internal linking with a strategy
• Using descriptive text links
• to keep the anchor text relevant to the target web page

Your anchor text is meant to provide search engines and users quick information about the page you are linking to.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

• Long anchor texts.
• Using off-topic link texts.
• One word anchor text or generic text.
• using naked URLs. (There are exceptions to this. for example when you try to promote a website domain name).

Your linking text is to be easy to identify by the visitors.

Using a different colour than the rest of the text helps your web visitors to spot the anchor links faster. You might be missing the chance for a visitor to buy or engage with your other linking pages.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

• Using exact match keywords as anchor text is too frequent.
• Adding links to internal or external web pages that add no value to your page.

As a rule of thumb, you need to be careful with which website you are linking to. Remember you are using your site reputation to send value to other websites. When not trusting a site, but you need to mention it, use the “nofollow” tag for search engines to interpret that intention.

Mobile-first websites are ranking better

More than 50% of internet users are using their mobile devices for their online daily routine. And the trend is going higher because the whole online advertising industry is mobile-first now. Because of this, your business needs to have a website ready for mobile. This means you need to ensure that your website works well on mobile devices, and you can’t just rely on a static web design.

Options to make your website mobile-first are many. here you have the three most common ways to achieve it:

• Having a responsive web design (important)
• AMP ready pages (Recommended)
• Dynamic serving

If you want to know how well prepared your website is for mobile indexing, check your more important pages with Google Mobile-Friendly Test. Alternatively, check out EXPERTE’s free bulk mobile-friendly checker for assessing multiple pages at the same time.

Include a mobile strategy in your online marketing efforts

Once your website is optimized for mobile browsing, you can incorporate content or designs to enhance your users’ mobile experience. Please close attention to what the Google Search Console report suggests to improve your website performance on mobile devices.

Accelerated Mobile Pages is another solution you should consider when aiming to boost your website’s SEO. Based on the size of your business, this might help your website reach more audiences. AMP pages come in handy when your website serves a considerable amount of static content like articles, Landing pages, etc. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) guarantees that your pages meet the criteria to load faster than regular desktop PC designed websites.

There is a setting you need to have in your website having web pages with AMP versions of them.

Your non-canonical webpages need tags like this:

<link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.yousite.com/yourpage/amp/">

And this to your AMP web page:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/yourcontent/document.html">

Note that the URLs above are examples, probably not reflecting the URL structure of your website. In a nutshell, your AMP setting must be done under these criteria:

• Your non AMP page needs as canonical its version on AMP
• Your AMP web page will have as canonical its non AMP version

WordPress and other CMSs takes care of these setting by default.

👍 SEO Best Practices

• Set your AMP and non-AMP canonicalization correctly
• Allow search engines to discover both versions of your web pages (AMP and non AMP)
• Use the Google AMP Friendly testing tool to ensure your pages are 100% ready for mobile
• Test both versions of your web pages for Mobile-Friendly Test

More advanced users will use Google Search Console to discover more optimizations needed to be done. With our guide to Search Engine Optimization, you can determine the right strategy for online advertising and keep your website relevant to search engines.

How to Optimize Your Site

An interesting fact about search engine optimization is that it is not a one-time event. You cannot simply “optimize” your site and then be done with it. Search engine optimization is an ongoing process that you need to keep up with in order to maintain high rankings.

You need to continuously update your website with new content, fresh keywords, and backlinks. If you don’t keep up with your SEO, your website will eventually become outdated and lose its ranking. You need to constantly monitor your website’s analytics to see what keywords and phrases are working, and which ones are not.

You also need to keep up with the latest trends in SEO so that you can make sure that your website is as visible as possible to potential customers. This means staying up to date on the latest changes in algorithms and search engine optimization techniques.

The Benefits of Optimizing Your Site

Statistically, it has been shown that optimizing your website can have a significant impact on your business. Not only will you see an increase in traffic, but you will also see an increase in conversions and sales.

You’ll be able to reach a larger audience with your message and product, and you’ll be able to convince more people to buy from you. You’ll see a significant increase in your bottom line, and you’ll be able to scale your business more effectively. You’ll also find that your customers are more satisfied, and that you have more time to focus on the things that matter most to you.

How to Optimize Your Webpages

The optimization of your webpages is crucial to your website’s success. There are a number of things you can do to optimize your webpages, including:

• – using keyword-rich titles and descriptions
• – using relevant, keyword-rich tags
• – creating compelling, original content
• – optimizing your website for search engines
• – using social media to promote your website
• – using other marketing channels to promote your website

By optimizing your website for search engines, you can attract more visitors to your site and improve your visibility online.

Social media is another great way to promote your website. By sharing content from your website on social media, you can reach a whole new audience and promote your site to people who may not have otherwise found it.

You can also use social media to build relationships with potential and current customers, which can lead to more website traffic and conversions. By engaging with customers on social media, you can create a rapport and build trust, which can encourage them to visit your website and make a purchase.

How to Optimize Your Content

Content is king, but if the content offer value to its readers. In order to make your content more valuable to your readers, you should optimize it by adding more detail, new ideas, and expanding on all points.

For example, if you’re writing a how-to guide, you should include more step-by-step instructions, or if you’re writing a personal essay, you should add more anecdotes and examples. In general, you should try to make your essay as personal and relatable as possible.

Anecdotes are a great way to do this – they help to paint a picture in the reader’s mind and give them a better understanding of who you are as a person. Examples can also be used to illustrate your points and help the reader to understand your argument more fully.

By providing concrete examples, you can make your writing more relatable and easier for the reader to follow. In addition, examples can also be used to add levity or humor to a piece.

For example, in an article about the benefits of meditation, the author could use a personal anecdote about a time when they tried to meditate and failed miserably. This would not only add some lightheartedness to the piece, but would also give readers a relatable experience.

The Different Types of Search Engine Optimization

SEO can be done on-page (on the website itself) and off-page (on other websites).

Basically, there are three different types of search engine optimisation: on-page, off-page and technical optimisation. The latter, technical SEO, can be considered part of on-page optimisation. 

On-page SEO is about optimising your website for both users and search engines. This can be done by optimising the title, meta tags, description, technical errors on the website and the content of your website. 

Off-page SEO is about optimising things that are not directly on your website. This includes things like social media, blogs, and directories. It also includes making sure your brand signals are consistent across all platforms. This means using the same logo, colors, and messaging on your website, social media, and any other marketing materials. 

On-Page Optimization Techniques

Some on-page optimization techniques include using the right keywords, having quality content, and having a mobile-friendly website. 

It’s important to use the right keywords on your website so that people can find you when they’re searching. Make sure to do your research and find out which keywords are most popular in your industry.

Once you’ve found the right keywords, use them throughout your website, including in the titles and descriptions of your pages. In addition to using keywords, you can also use other marketing strategies to draw attention to your website.

For example, you can use social media to promote your website and drive traffic to it. You can also use paid advertising to reach a wider audience. Whatever marketing strategies you use, make sure you are consistent and put in the effort.

You need to be creative and come up with new ideas to keep people interested. Keep track of what works and what doesn’t, and always be willing to adjust your approach.

Off-Page Optimization Techniques

There are a number of ways to optimize your website for better search engine visibility, and many of them have to do with off-page factors. Here are some of the most effective off-page optimization techniques to keep in mind:

1. Creating the type of content that attracts high-quality backlinks:

This means creating content that is informative, interesting, and engaging. Content that is truly worth reading and sharing. This is the kind of content that other websites will want to link to, and that will help you to build up your own authority and credibility. 

The more high-quality websites that link to your site, the more authority and credibility your site will have in the eyes of search engines. This is because search engines view links as votes of confidence in the quality of your site.

The more votes you have, the more credible your site appears, and the higher it will rank in search engine results pages.

Quality links can come from a variety of sources, including other websites, social media platforms, and even offline sources like print publications.

2. keeping NAP consistency:

It’s important to make sure that your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) is consistent across all of your marketing channels. This means that if you have a different phone number on your website than you do on your Facebook page, it will be difficult for customers to reach you.

Make sure that your contact information is consistent across all platforms to make it easy for customers to get in touch with you.

3. Social Media Marketing:

You can use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to connect with potential and current customers. These platforms can be used to share news, product information, and special offers. You can also use social media to answer customer questions and address concerns.

This is a great way to connect with your customers and build a rapport. Plus, it shows that you’re responsive to their needs and concerns.

4. Guest Content:

One of the best ways to build a strong relationship with your customers is through guest posts. This can be in the form of blog posts, articles or podcasts. With valuable and informative posts, you can show your clients that you’re an expert in your field.

This builds trust and credibility, which is important for any website. By offering helpful information, you can also establish yourself as a resource that your customers can rely on.

Don’t confuse guest posts with link building, because guest posts help to raise the profile of your business, while link building is a waste of money and time.

5. Forum Posting:

Forum contributions are a good way to raise the profile of your company. By posting in relevant forums, you can reach a large number of potential clients and customers. In addition, forum posts can help drive links to your website, which can improve your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Taking the time to participate in online forums can help you reach a large number of potential clients who mightn’t have otherwise become aware of your business.

Forums not only raise the profile of your business, but are also a great opportunity to network with other businesses and make contact, which can lead to future collaborations.

6. Local Listings:

You can list your business on online directories and local listings pages, which makes it easier for customers to find you. This is a great way to get your name out there and attract new customers.

White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO

When it comes to website optimization, there are a number of different techniques that can be employed in order to improve search engine ranking. However, there are also a number of techniques that can actually get a website ignored or penalized by Google.

White hat and black hat SEO are two different approaches to search engine optimization. 

White hat SEO is the more traditional, ethical approach that focuses on creating quality content and backlink earned organically. 

Black hat SEO, on the other hand, is a more aggressive approach that uses techniques that can get a website ignored by search engines. These techniques include keyword stuffing, backlink manipulation, plagiarism, and more. 

What about gray hat SEO?

From my point of view, there is no such a thing as gray hat SEO. Either you are using black hat techniques, which are clearly unethical and will get you banned from search engines, or you are using white hat techniques, which are the only ones that are going to get you long-term results. Anything in between is just a waste.

Simply because the moment you apply a black hat technique, you’re risking getting caught and banned. It’s not worth it to take shortcuts when it comes to SEO. Play by the rules and be patient, and you’ll see your hard work pay off in the long run.

The Importance of SEO

The importance of SEO cannot be understated. It is the bread and butter of any website looking to rank highly in search engines. Without it, your website would languish on the lower pages of search results, where few people would ever see it. 

Just remember,

• SEO is a long-term strategy, and it can take months or even years to see results.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility and ranking of a website or web page in search engine results pages (SERPs).
• SEO is a component of inbound marketing, which seeks to attract customers through digital channels such as search engines, social media, and email.
• SEO is not a one-time thing, and it requires ongoing effort to maintain and improve rankings.
• The goal of SEO is to improve the visibility and ranking of a website or web page in search engine results pages (SERPs).
• The higher the ranking, the more likely people are to find the website or web page.
• SEO can be divided into two main categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

In Speed Marketing Agency, we focus on helping businesses and freelancers to reach better rankings on search results pages. Contact us for a free consultation or if you prefer, give us a call at +357 99762835.