What is SEO?
SEO is search engine optimization. It refers to optimizing websites to improve their position in search engine result pages (SERPs). This optimizes websites to increase organic traffic. SEOs don’t manipulate Google. They manipulate websites to expose search engines’ value.
SEO Basics and Best Practices for 2022
SEO is a method of doing things that follow best practices. SEO basics will help you create the content people want to find. This will result in steady organic traffic to websites.
These are some of the best practices:
Keyword Research
On-Page Optimization
Technical SEO
Keyword Research
Although you can rank first for keywords with low search volume, it won’t provide any return or value. Keyword research is crucial.
Keyword research is the foundation of SEO. Once you have identified the keywords that you wish to target, you can begin creating content and optimizing content for your website to increase its rank for those keywords.
Understanding what customers are looking for online is the first step to keyword research. It’s sometimes easy to find keywords that your customers are searching for if it’s a broad term related to your core business.
Sometimes it’s more difficult, and you’ll need to create content to help someone who isn’t sure they need to visit the permanent makeup studio. To target those who might have uneven eyebrows or need immediate attention, you could create a page on “what is the best process of getting microblading for natural looking permanent eyebrows?”
On-Page Optimization
Writing content that is focused on your target keywords is no longer enough. You must optimize the page’s key elements if you want to rank.
Title tags: Sometimes, it cannot be easy to create a title tag that includes your keyword phrase. It is important to make your title easily readable and catch the reader’s attention. If your target keyword is “permanent makeup,” your title tag might read “The Best Practices Before Opting for Permanent Makeup.”
URLs: It is much easier to choose a URL. Most URLs can be a match for your keyword phrase. You would use the same example above to make your URL: /permanent-makeup/.
Headings: Headings can be a powerful signal to Google about the content of your page. It is best to make the page title the only H1 and make every heading or subtopic an H2. You may use bold or H3s for longer content. These headings should be keyword optimized whenever possible. You should avoid using the same keyword phrase as the page title. Also, don’t force a keyword or keyword phrase into a heading if you feel, think, or hear something unnatural. To improve clarity, you might add the keyword “Microbalding” to a heading instead of “Permanent makeup” to improve clarity.
Format your content: Divide large sections of text where you can. Instead of writing a lengthy sentence listing issues with eyebrows, make a bulleted list. This will allow you to display the information in an easy-to-read format quickly. Make an H2 for the title of the list. Then make the items H3s. If the content is “Types of Wound dressings,” then create the H2 “9 Types of Wund Dressings” to make each type of wound dressing H3s.
Internal linking: Make sure to link to other content on your site whenever you can. You could link to the page “The Best Diet For People With Osteoarthritis”, or to the page “What Is Osteoarthritis?”.
Meta descriptions: Google can create different meta descriptions for different query types, even if the page content is identical. Although they are not directly related to ranking, they can have an impact on clickthrough rates (CTR). Therefore, it is important to create a meta description that encourages users to click through to your site. This can be done by explaining the page’s unique proposition and urging users to click. Search engines often bold synonym keywords and target keywords to help your result stand out.
Images: Images on a page will increase page load times. Images are the number one reason pages load slowly. Resize images so they are only as large as you need them to be, and not one pixel more. Unless you require transparent backgrounds, save images as JPG. Next, compress the image as little as possible to preserve image quality. Once the image has been resized and compressed you will need to rename it using the target keyword phrase. Also, optimize the alt text. Crawlers will use the file name as well as the alt text to understand the image. Avoid keyword stuffing and instead keyword optimize the image in the same way you transformed the keyword phrase into a human-readable title tag.
Technical SEO
Even if your website is optimized for search engines, technical issues can prevent it from performing as well. A basic understanding of technical concepts can help you optimize your website for search engines and allow you to communicate with developers about any changes or problems. Some technical SEO changes, unlike on-page optimization will require the assistance of a developer.
SEO: No-indexing is the biggest error you can make. A website that cannot be indexed is the second most serious mistake. Your site should be easily indexable. This means that WordPress users should uncheck the box in Settings > Reading > Search Engine Viability. For other sites, however, this could mean that a developer needs to edit the code to change the robots meta tag “index, follow”.
301 redirects: Websites can change through redesigns, strategy changes, and many other factors. Websites often change their URLs when they are updated. Google may consider a website that has content moving from one URL to another as if it were a new page. You could lose all your rankings and hard work. If a backlink links to a page that returns 404, it can lose all its value. Not only is it important to create redirects to recoup all of the link value, but also to improve the user experience and let Google know that content has changed. For example, you may have had all of your blogs include the year, month, and date in the URL, creating unnecessarily long URLs like this “/2020/01/30/permanent-makeup/” and someone made the decision to update these URLs to “/blog/permanent-makeup/” instead. You can set up a redirect to the old URL so you don’t lose all your organic traffic.
Sitemaps: A sitemap is a great way to give search engines a list URLs that you wish to be indexed. Google will be able to crawl your site quicker and index it faster. Because the sitemap is dynamic, Google will notice any changes or new content in the sitemap. Sitemaps of pages allow you to view all pages that can be crawled or indexed on your website. Check your sitemap file to ensure that test pages, autogenerated archives, or other pages you don’t want users to land on are not indexed. Once you have completed an audit of the sitemap file, submit it through Search Console to Google.
Mobile friendly: You’ve probably heard it before, unless you’ve been living in the shadows for the last few years. Mobile traffic is rapidly rising and has quickly become more popular than desktop traffic. Google recently made its mobile-first index mobile-friendly. This means that it’s crucial to optimize your website for mobile users. Your website should be mobile-friendly. You can also work with your developers on fixing any problems. Here’s Google’s mobile-friendly test: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
Pages peed: Page speed has been an important ranking factor for some time, but now with the move to a mobile-first Index and the fact that mobile connections can be just as stable or fast as desktop connections, page speed matters more than ever. Google announced Core Web Vitals, a new ranking signal that uses real-world data to assess how pages perform. It gives you a score between Good, Needs Improvement, and Poor. Your developer will be able to help you improve your score and ensure that every URL passes with a score “Good”.
