What Is SEO? 7 Best Practices to Get Better Ranking!

If you're a website owner, you've probably heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). But, what is SEO and why is it important for your website? Well, if you make a website, of course, you want your content to be easily found by your target audience and SEO is the best way to achieve this.

SEO considers Google's ranking factors to make comprehensive strategies for website optimisation. This is why implementing SEO on your website can increase your chances of becoming a top-ranked website. To learn more about SEO, its importance and best practices, read the article below!

What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a set of strategies that help search engines understand your content by optimising all aspects related to your website. SEO aims to get better visibility on the search engine result page (SERP).

According to data, 75% of searchers only look at the first page of search results, this shows that getting top rankings or at least showing up on the first page is very important to increase online traffic and build online presence.

Let's say you create some content and then post it on your website. If you haven't optimised it for search engines, will your target audience actually read it? Or, are you sure they'll visit your website? In fact, there will be only a very small chance they see your content at all. What’s worse is they may don't even know it exists. That is why you need SEO.

SEO marketing is a strategy that uses an SEO approach to do online marketing with the objective of getting as many customers as possible.

Nowadays, many marketers are using Google Search Engine Optimisation to help them improve their online presence and reach a wider audience that was far away and unreachable before.

Why Is SEO Important?

SEO isn't the only way to get your business seen online and drive traffic to your website, but it's a great option because it's the most cost-effective and provides long-term results. 

Trillions of searches are made every year and these searches are the primary traffic for websites. That is why it's very important to make your website SEO-friendly on every device to increase its visibility and win online competition with other businesses in the same niche. 

If you are running a business, selling products and services online SEO can be very helpful to build brand awareness and increase conversion and sales. 

How Does SEO Work?

Google uses a machine-learning algorithm to determine content rankings, taking into account over 200 ranking factors. That is why practitioners created SEO as a comprehensive guide to make your website in line with Google's ranking factor.

Google has a bot program called crawler that automatically explores your web and understands your page content and its relevance to the search queries. So, the thing you can do is to help the crawler make its job easier on your website by optimising the overall web page aspect.

Google search engine optimisation doesn't cost anything to implement, but it just takes time, effort, and consistency. 

Types of SEO

SEO is a pretty complex strategy, so to make it as easy as possible to implement, it can be broken down into four main categories:

1. On-page SEO

The first type of SEO is on-page SEO, which is a practice that focuses on improving the aspect within the website. This includes keyword research, creating engaging and well-structured content, title tags, meta description and image alt text.

2. Off-page SEO

Unlike on-page SEO, off-page SEO optimises a website by building backlink relationships with other parties. This includes business listings, guest posting and working with bloggers, influencers and public figures.

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves optimising all the technical aspects of a website. It starts with website architecture, checking that your website can be easily crawled and indexed by search engines.

Technical SEO also involves improving key technical aspects such as URL structure, navigation and internal linking. Make sure that the user experience on your website is optimal by providing fast loading speed, easy to navigate and mobile friendly.

4. Local SEO

This last category is SEO strategy that focuses on attracting a local audience. Local SEO goals are to increase local traffic to get customers to visit your store. 

This category is mostly used by businesses or organisations that have physical stores in specific areas. Local SEO involves optimising Google's business profile, listing on local directories, targeting keywords and content to be local-centric, and gaining backlinks from local parties.

SEO Best Practices

After you understand what is SEO and how it works, it's time to learn the best practices to implement it on your website to get the best results. Here are some tips you can take:

1. Use the Main Keyword Naturally on Content

The first important thing in doing SEO is to choose the best keyword and place it properly. Once you get the keyword that is most suitable to your content, you should place it on your content naturally according to the context of the content. You can also use variant keywords in the content to avoid keyword stuffing.

It is also important to put your main keyword on the meta title, meta description, slug and heading. Because Google pays attention to the term that appears at the top of your page. 

2. Choose Engaging Title, Description, and Content

Your title and description are the first thing users see before they click on your page, so it's important to choose a title that's relevant, unique and eye-catching. When it comes to the meta description, you can give your audience a quick overview of what your content is about. Make it as informative as possible.

Your content is like the soul of your website. It should be related to your business and suitable to what your audience needs. To make your content more engaging, you can take the topic of what's trending in your industry, and add some images, infographics, or short videos.

3. Optimise User Experience

Optimising your website for a better user experience is one of the best practices for SEO. Google will know if your site attracts users because of lower bounce rates and longer time spent on your site.

There are a few simple ways you can improve the user experience. Make sure your content is well structured and well-written, make it easy for users to navigate, reduce the number of ads that cover the content, and make it mobile-friendly.

4. Improve Website Loading Speed

Page loading speed is one of Google's ranking factors, so it can be a very good idea to make your site load as quickly as possible. 

You can check your loading speed with SEO tools to run the page speed test. If your page takes more than 3 seconds to load, here are the tips you can do to improve it:

• Compressing images on your site.
• Apply a lightweight theme.
• Using lazy loading images.
• Using CDN.

5. Optimise Images for SEO

Recently, Google has reported that properly optimised images can boost page rankings in search results. The thing you can do to make your images SEO-friendly is to name your images with the most relevant descriptive name.

You can also optimise your images for SEO by adding alt text. Google uses alt text to understand images, so this can help your content rank in search results also on Google Images.

6. Build Internal Links and Backlinks

Internal linking is the next step you should take to boost your SEO, all you need to do is create a link from one page to another page on the website. You can start by creating keyword-rich anchor text on each piece of content you create and link it to the relevant page.

In addition, you can add a CTA link pointing to your services page or appointments page. This will not only make it easy for your reader to get to the next step, but will also make it easier for crawlers to understand your content.

If internal linking is the practice link building that happens on an internal website, backlinking is different. Backlinking is the practice of building backlinks from other parties, which includes listing on directories, guest posting, and making relationships with other business partners.

7. Audit SEO Strategy

Last but not least, you should as well regularly audit your SEO performance. SEO results can only be seen if you make a consistent effort and always make improvements. Also, Google periodically updates its algorithm. Thus, to help you stay in your position and not be outranked by your competitor, make sure that your strategies are updated.

Conclusion

Now you understand what is SEO, why it is important, and what are best practices for implementing it. In conclusion, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a powerful strategy that you can use to gain online visibility and high rankings on search engines. Because of its many benefits and cost-effectiveness, SEO strategies are widely used by marketers to promote their products or services online.

However, SEO is a long-term strategy that requires time and consistency. Therefore, if you need help from a professional SEO company to implement it, you can collaborate with SEO Services by cmlabs.

We can help you to create an effective SEO strategy that suits the needs of your business, from the planning stage to the implementation and review. So, what are you waiting for? Contact our marketing team, discuss your SEO needs now and get a free consultation