17 SEO Tips to Help Improve SEO on Your Site
It should be obvious at this point that SEO (search engine optimization) is imperative for any business owner who wishes to get more targeted traffic and build their business, plus provide excellence to their customers. Remember, good SEO is all about improving the content on the internet, not stifling you. Search engines just want to send their audience to high-quality, relevant, honest content. This is why I thought it would be helpful to you to learn about 17 SEO tips improve your site.
Now let’s start learning about SEO and how you can use it – starting today.
You can do a lot right now to make your SEO better, and some of it quickly. These tips will make a huge difference in how SEO is working for you to get more traffic, convert more customers, and make more money.
- Responsive Is Required – There is no more room for waiting to create a responsive website. This means that your site needs to work and look great no matter what device your customer is using. If someone is looking at your site on their phone while waiting for a doctor’s appointment and it won’t work on their device, they won’t go find you later on their PC. Plus, Google prioritizes responsive sites over ones that aren’t.
- Keep Content Focused – When you first start writing content, keep it super-laser-focused on only one problem, issue, or topic at a time. This will make it a lot easier to create an abundance of content for your site.
When you’re done posting the most laser-focused content, which could take years, you can work on broader content if you want to. But, the more focused your content, the more people and search engines will be attracted to it. Let’s continue now with 17 SEO tips to improve your site…
- Understand Your Keyword Metrics – It’s important to keep track of how the keywords you are using perform. The best way to do this is to use Google Analytics. Write down the information about the traffic and response you’re getting before you start and then 30 days later and at least every 90 days thereafter, to find out how the keywords you’ve picked are performing.
- Get Inbound Links – In the old days, people did a lot of sneaky things to get inbound links. Today, the only inbound links that will make a difference are “do-follow” links from authoritative websites. Do not use general article marketing sites, or most directories outside of official ones, because Google doesn’t value them.
- Use Software – There are many choices, but the best one to use for SEO on your site (if you use WordPress) is Yoast SEO. This plugin, when upgraded to the paid version, will help you in numerous ways to ensure that you’re doing everything you can to use good SEO practices on your site.
- Improve Your Technology – How fast your site loads, how the plugins you use work together, even your web host, can make a huge difference in whether your website gets more traffic or not. You want your site to load fast, and you want everything to work without a hitch so no one bounces off.
- Keep Up with What’s New in SEO – Every few months (sometimes weeks), something about what works in terms of SEO changes. It changes because Google’s job is to deliver excellent content to their users. To accomplish that, they do everything they can to eliminate websites they or their users view as spam or a waste of time.
- Optimize Page Titles – Each page of your website should have a unique page title. The title should describe what they’re going to find inside when they click, using as few words as possible without overstuffing it with keywords. Keywords should be in the first three words.
- Check Search Engine Crawlability – You can use a tool like RankSider.com or SEOSiteCheckup.com to help you discover whether your website is crawlable or not. There are numerous services which will help you find out, plus some of them tell you what to fix if necessary. If your robot.txt file is set up wrong or accidentally set up to block search engines, they’ll let you know.
- Make URLs Easy to Read and Understand – Don’t use strange website URLs for content that you want to be found. Instead, use straightforward URLs that aren’t too long. The right URLs will improve search rank as well as make them friendlier to your audience.
- Get Local When Relevant – If you want to attract local people to your website, remember to use local search terms and local words within URLs, menus, categories, and subcategories to make it clear to users and search engines.
- Improve Meta Descriptions – Create a different description for every single page of your website that describes that page. Also, don’t forget to add in the alt-tag description information for every image that you put on your site.
- Image Names – When you name an image for your site, don’t give it a number but rather name it by what’s in it. Naming an image something like “bluebutteflycover” is a lot better for search engines than giving it an arbitrary number.
- Include a Sitemap – Yoast SEO will help you create a sitemap automatically. If you don’t use that, find a way to create a sitemap that is Google friendly so that your site can ensure that the bots crawl your site and don’t miss anything important. Also, if you make the sitemap available to users, they may be able to find things that they wouldn’t otherwise.
- Know Your Competition – This may seem like a weird tip for SEO, but your competition also uses SEO. You can study their site using software like iSpionage.com (mentioned earlier), to find out what words they’re using so that you can get ideas for more keywords.
- Avoid Duplicate Content Issues – When you mention duplicate content issues, most people think about using private label rights content as a blog post or using syndicated content, but that isn’t always bad. What is bad is having duplicate content on your website. The way to avoid that is to use canonical link elements to tell the search engine which page is the main one, and to set up the page you don’t want to be searched as no-index.
- Use Breadcrumbs – This is easy to set up in the site settings with self-hosted WordPress sites. The reason you want breadcrumbs is that these barely noticeable links allow your users to find themselves around based on where they are, and it gives more links to follow for the search engine bots.
Can you now see the importance of these 17 SEO tips to help improve SEO on your site? These SEO tips can make a lot of difference for how your site shows up in search, but also how easy it is for your users to use it. After all, being found isn’t going to matter if your users can’t navigate and understand your website.
I’m author, publisher, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and would love to connect with you. If you are new to the world of online entrepreneurship please check out my comprehensive training on how to set up Funnels That Click and learn how to gain an unfair advantage when it comes to building a lucrative online business.
Nancy Dadami says
Great list of tips Connie. I have a few to check for my site. Thank you
Connie Ragen Green says
So glad this post is helpful, Nancy. Improving our site’s SEO is crucial to our businesses.
Connie Ragen Green
Ivan Boychuk says
Hey Connie! I’m a copywriter and I’ve just finished creating a website for my business. I thought I was finished but it appears I have a lot of work to do on the SEO side of things! Can’t wait to implement these tips! Thanks!
Connie Ragen Green says
Thanks for stopping by, Ivan. An entrepreneur’s work is never finished! Learning more about SEO will increase your bottom line and give you a feeling of ownership with your business. Your new site looks great! Now, to make it rank for your keywords…think long-tail and you will prosper.
Connie Ragen Green
Connie Ragen Green recently posted…Find Affiliates Through Networking
Norma Esler says
Great article, Connie! Tools I especially appreciate are WordPress, which automatically sizes your site to fit the device your reader is using, and the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress that you mention.
Thanks for a great collection of tips!
Mansoor Bhanpurawala says
Great article, Connie! Tools I especially appreciate are WordPress, which automatically sizes your site to fit the device your reader is using, and the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress that you mention.
Mansoor Bhanpurawala recently posted…How To Rank Your Blog Post Higher On Google