Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a necessity for businesses that aim to stay successful in the long run. The world of SEO is constantly evolving which requires businesses to pay attention and not miss out on new ways to dominate search engines. 

However, the fundamentals do not change-making the SEO ground rules imperative to a website’s success. 

While there are numerous SEO tips and strategies that can help in improving your website’s ranking in search results, there are a few that are absolutely important and cannot be ignored. 

Let’s dig into them right away.

1. Focus on Site Speed for SEO

Imagine this. You have opened a website but it is taking forever to load. You got lucky after a minute and can now see some text on the website but images have still not loaded.

How does that make you feel about the website? Surely, it does not leave a good impression.

What will you do? No one likes to wait. Like the majority of people, you will close the website instead of waiting for it to load.

The same happens when your website fails to load quickly, contributing to a high bounce rate and fewer prospects of locking in a deal.

It is always good to keep your page load time under 3 seconds. To check website speed, you can use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool.

To improve website speed, start by optimizing images on your website to reduce their size. Use tools like TinyPNG that compress images and reduce file size without impacting image quality.

2. Engage in Link Building Activities

Link building is the process of gaining backlinks to your website from other websites. It helps in sending traffic to your website from other places on the web and builds credibility.

But how do you gain backlinks?

The answer is simple. You start by giving backlinks to other websites. For example, when writing a blog post, if you come across a credible piece of information that you wish to add to your article, give credit to the website where it’s shared. 

This not only helps in providing your readers with well-researched content but also provides a backlink to the website from where you got the information.

If your content is good enough, you will also start gaining backlinks from other websites in a similar way.

However, if the aim is to actively gain backlinks, start by reaching out to suitable websites and request them to link back to you. Give them something that will add value to their website and entertain their audience while benefitting you as well.

3. Do not Forget Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions appear under a website’s title on the search engine results page. They serve as the first impression of your business even before people visit your website. In short, they help in bringing traffic to your website and hence, should be a crucial part of your SEO strategy.

If you do not add meta descriptions to your webpages, you will be giving Google the authority to pull some text out of your pages and serve them as meta descriptions. Let’s be honest, that’s not the best way to introduce your business to potential customers.

By adding unique meta descriptions to all the pages of your website, you are basically helping your website to show up in search results of queries relevant to your business, improve website ranking, and attract more customers.

You can add the keyword for which you want your page to rank in the meta description of the page. Remember, Google does not like duplicate content. Avoid copying meta descriptions of other websites or using the same description for all your pages.

4. Have Readable URLs

If you want to dominate search engines with your SEO strategy, make sure you are paying attention to all the URLs on your website.

URLs are read by search engines. They convey meaningful data to the crawlers that can help your website in showing up on search results. 

However, if your URL looks something like the one given below, you will be missing an opportunity to rank your website on SERP. 

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/358149

Make sure your URL contains the main keyword for which you want to rank the page. Adding keywords to the URL not only helps the search engines to understand what the page is about but also sets the expectations of the readers.

However, avoid keyword stuffing or adding too many keywords to the URL. You will be confusing the search engines as well as the searchers about what the page is for.

5. Add Alternate Text (ALT-TEXT) to Images for SEO

Alternate text, or commonly called ALT-text, helps your website in several ways. Firstly, crawlers do not understand images. To get some SEO juice out of an image on your page, describe what it is in the alternate text section. This helps in making the image readable for the crawlers.

Secondly, the alternate text helps people with special needs to understand what the image is about. It makes your website accessible for everyone. 

Thirdly, alt-text helps in ranking your website in image searches. For example, if someone is looking for a ‘black chair’ and you have an image on your website with an alt-text of ‘black chair’, your webpage will get a chance to rank for the particular keyword.

Again, avoid keyword stuffing. If the keyword is ‘chair’ and your alternate text looks something like ‘black chair blue chair good chair office chair’, you can get penalized for keyword stuffing.

Make sure you are properly describing what is in the image instead of why you are using the image. 

Conclusion

Paid marketing is all the rage these days but Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the ultimate long-term solution for lead generation and business development. SEO best practices change from time to time but the 5 tips shared in this post are the fundamental ones that MUST not be overlooked in any case. We hope you implement these strategies and start seeing results soon.

About Hoplytics

Hoplytics is a digital marketing services provider that helps businesses achieve their goals through ingenious marketing strategies that deliver results.