To keep it straight and simple, if your website doesn’t appear in Google’s top few pages for your target keywords, it might as well not exist. The average user doesn’t scroll past page one of Google, let alone to page ten. That said, there are ways around this and a few key practices that can be put in place to boost your current standing. 

By incorporating SEO best practices into your basic website foundation and general strategies, you’ll be setting your business up the right way. From this firm footing, you can build on an SEO strategy that allows your website fame to grow with each piece of organic footfall that crosses your threshold. 

Let’s look at what SEO best practices are and some key ones to stick by. But first… what do we mean by SEO best practice?

Ultimately, SEO best practices are checkpoints that will ensure that search engines like Google can crawl, index and rank your content. Think of times you’ve used Google to find what you’re looking for – how likely is it that you will venture further than the first, second, or third pages? Precisely.

Some SEO Best Practices To Live By

Matching Content With Search Intent

Our number 1 recommendation for SEO best practice is to remain in alignment with users’ search intent when creating content. 

Every search query is driven by search intent, often referred to as “user intent.” Google’s first aim is to figure our and fulfil users’ search intentions. You will probably find that all websites appearing on page one of Google have successfully aced its test for search intent. 

Title Tags And Meta Descriptions

From an SEO standpoint, title tags, which are clickable headlines that show in search results, are incredibly important. They are the most important piece of SEO content real estate. Google enables a title tag to display between 50 and 60 characters, so you need to make sure you use them all. 

Some SEO best practices regarding title tags are: 

  • Specify your desired keyword(s)
  • Make sure your title reflects the search query
  • Don’t use redundant title tags
  • Don’t waste space!

Equally as important, we have meta descriptions. Meta descriptions are a boiled down description of the page in question and are displayed below the tile tag. Google allows for meta descriptions to display 150-160 characters.

Some SEO best practices for meta descriptions are:

  • For every page, provide a distinct meta description
  • Put a call to action in your text
  • Specify your desired keyword(s)
  • Match the search intent
  • Give a thorough summary pf the page context within the character limit

Page Speed

How do you feel about clicking through to a website, only to find yourself waiting for it to load? And with frustrated users, you lose interest, which in turn results in your rankings dropping. There are an assortment of free tools available to survey your page speed, and there are also a few things you can do to get your pages loading faster:

  • Allow browser caching
  • Remove unused plugins
  • Reduce the amount of redirects and the server response time
  • Cut back on JavaScript and CSS files
  • Reduce the size of your image content

There’s a whole world beyond this, but with these few SEO best practices in place, you have an insightful and useful place to begin. Naturally, you could just leave it to the experts too. Contact the Gone Digital team and chat with an SEO representative to learn more about SEO best practices.