The importance of search engine optimization is growing day-by-day and that makes it essential for you to understand what SEO truly means along with the potential it stores for every business out there. You also need to understand and follow certain guidelines of SEO that will help your business grow.

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a set of best practices undertaken by website owners and blog owners to optimize their websites and blogs for various search engines and thus improve their reach engine rankings.

Additionally, these best practices make the website more user-friendly, easier to navigate and faster to load.

Why is SEO Important?

Today’s markets are more competitive than ever and this competition will keep becoming stiffer with each passing day. Millions of users refer search engines everyday trying to get their questions answered or to get solutions to their problems. If you are a web master and own a website, a blog, or an online store, SEO can help you meet your business objectives by growing your business.

Some web masters believe that SEO is an outdated practice that is quickly dying. But, is Search Engine Optimization really dead?

According to Forbes, “SEO is far from dead, but is changing drastically.” And in order to keep up with these changes, you need to constantly learn and upgrade your SEO strategy to continuously rank higher in search results.

What are the Best Practices for SEO?

Most of the search engine users majorly click on one of the top 5 suggestions provided in the search result page. Hence, to take advantage of this and to increase the number of visitors to your blog or customers to your e-commerce website you need to rank as high as possible in search results.

SEO can broadly be divided into:

• On-Site SEO
• Off-Site SEO

Let us walk you through SEO best practices for both the categories.

On-Site SEO

Various factors contribute to the ranking of your website for search engines. The practices that lay emphasis on those factors which are controlled on your website are called On-Site SEO.

Page Content

Content pages are the focal point of your website and are, more often than not, the reason users visit your website. Optimally, the content pages should be very specific to the topic of the webpage and should provide detailed information.

When we search for “contra” on Google, the first three search results are of Wikipedia:

The webpage on clicking the first link looks like this:

Let us study this page with respect to its content:

• The content is unique on the internet. This makes the page rank well for search engines.
• The entire information is focused only around the topic – Contra.
• The depth of information provided is immense. That makes it a relevant page for any query regarding ‘Contra’ as the page will be able to provide answers to almost all queries.
• The title of the page is apt to the search keyword.
• The searched keyword appears several times in the content. This increases the keyword density and helps improve the search rank of the page.

URL Structure

The URL is one of the most fundamental building blocks of SEO. And thus, even though the various search engines are more capable than before in handling a lot of technical challenges, the easier you can make it for them and your users, the better your results tend to be.

For better page ranking in search results, try to follow these guidelines:

• Prefer subfolder over subdomain

Various examples and evidences support the use of subfolder in URLs rather than subdomain. The ranking of a blog page with subfolder in its URL has better ranking than that of a blog page with subdomain in its URL.

• Make it more readable by users

Accessibility of a link for a user is part of SEO ranking factors. Thus, the more readable is your link for your users, the better it will rank in search results.

Even though readability varies from person to person, the following illustration might help:

• Keep keywords in the URL

Keeping keywords in your URL is a good SEO practice for various reasons:

1. Sets the right expectation

   When a user hovers over your link that is shared on social media, in an email, or on other pages, they can gauge exactly what to expect upon clicking the link.

2. Acts as a good anchor text
   Many of your users will share your content by copy-pasting the link to your webpage. If no other anchor text is created, the URL acts as the anchor text. The more readable is your URL, the better will be this anchor text.
   
3. Enhances the search results
   The keywords in your URL show up in search results and as per a research, the URL is one of the most important factor a searcher takes into consideration while clicking on a link.

• Use rel=canonical for similar content

Multiple pages with the same content is a common occurrence, but not a good practice. It is advised to use either a 301 redirect or a rel=canonical HTML tag in order to avoid such an occurrence.

Even though the repetition of content does not impose any direct penalty, but it indirectly affects the page ranking by splitting the SEO points due to duplicate content.

• Shorten the URL length

A good URL length is between 50-60 characters. If your URL length lies within this range, no worries. But if it exceeds 100 characters, shortening it will definitely reap benefits for you.

A longer URL does not pose a problem for the search engines, but a shorter URL is more user friendly. Shorter URLs are easier to parse, to copy and paste, to share on social media, and to embed. This indirectly affects your page rank.

Thus, for URL length, small is big!

• Match your URL to the title

Matching URL and titles makes your website more reliable from a user’s point of view. The URL creates an expectation in the mind of the user and the title delivers to that expectation.

For example, if the title is “My Favorite 50 Sportsmen”, an appropriate URL can be “www.example.com/blog/favorite-50-sportsmen” or anything on same lines.

Title Tag

A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. Title elements have long been considered one of the most important on-page SEO elements. The most important is, of course, the overall content. The title tags appear in three key places: browsers, search engine results pages, and external websites. And here is why it is important for SEO:

• Browser

Usually, the title tags show up on the browser’s tab. For certain web browsers (like Safari), it also shows up at the top of the browser.

• Search Engine Results Page

The keywords that you use in the title tag are highlighted by the search engines in their search results, when a user performs a search using those keywords. This gives the user greater visibility, and generally means you’ll get a higher click-through rate.

• External Websites

Many external websites, especially social media sites, will use the title tag of a web page as its link anchor text.

Other Tags

Besides the title tag, the page heading tags and the ALT tag also hold some importance with respect to on-site SEO. Let us have a look at these in detail:

• Page Heading Tags

Page headings might not be as strong a ranking factor as they once were, but they are still a good idea to include keywords and phrases in them. Create one <h1> tag as your main page heading and then use <h2> – <h6> tags to present a hierarchy for the rest of the content.

• ALT Tags

ALT attributes particularly are one of the few signals you can give about images. Don’t stuff them full of keywords. Write them as they were meant to be written as short descriptions for people who can’t see the image.

Off-Site SEO

Similar to on-site SEO, various factors also contribute to the ranking of your website for search engines which cannot be controlled from your website. The practices that lay emphasis on these are called Off-Site SEO.

Besides the changes you can do to your web site (on-site SEO) so that it ranks higher in the SERPs, the other way to improve your web site’s ranking position is by using off-site SEO techniques.

Building Links

In general, search engines are trying to find the most important pages of the web and show those first when a user enters a search query. One of the factors to determine the position a web page will appear in the results is the number of incoming links.

Incoming links are a signal of trust and depending from where the links are coming, they can greatly affect your ranking position (either positively if the links are coming from well-known and trusted sites or negatively if they are paid links, article directories, link farms etc.).

Google popularized the idea of incoming links as a ranking factor. Incoming links are at the heart of Google’s ‘PageRank’ algorithm. At its core the idea was that a link counts as a vote or recommendation by one page for another. Over time this has evolved quite a bit, but I think it’s still useful to think about links as votes or recommendations.

But how do you build these links? Here is how you can build good links:

• Build trust and authority in your site by acquiring links from general and topical trusted and authority sites.
• Build trust and authority in a single page on your site by acquiring links from general and topical trusted and authority web pages.
• Try to get links with variations of your main key-phrase in the anchor text.
• Seek links from a diverse set of sites and pages.
• Sometimes it’s simply a numbers game. More links or better more link juice, PR, or whatever you want to call it, is better. Quality though, is usually preferred to quantity.

You should note that not all links are equally useful. Some are high quality links and others are low quality.

Low quality links

These are usually easy to get. Forums, directories, blog comments are a few examples. These links are links and they should pass on raw link juice and value. However, because these links are generally low quality you probably don’t want to spend too much time trying to get them without having other reasons for getting those links.

High quality links

They are harder to get and will ultimately give you more benefit. It makes more sense to actively work to get these links. Trusted, authority sites probably aren’t going to link to you just because you ask. You’re generally going to need to give them a reason to link to you.

One of the best ways to this is by guest blogging. You need to give something to gain something. But even before you go for guest blogging, you need to build a good image for yourself. Only then will a reputed web master let guest blog for them.

Remember first and foremost the goal is to write the best post you can for that other site.

Build relationships. Network with other designers. We’re all more likely to help friends than we are to help strangers. We’re also more likely to be familiar with the content of people and sites we know making it easier to link to that content.

In the end the best way to generate quality links is to have content worth linking to. Instead of spending all your time chasing after links with dubious benefit spend more time creating content others will find useful.

SEO Best Practices Cheat Sheet