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SEO Best Practices: The Always Up-To-Date Guide with a Checklist

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SEO is one of the most profitable marketing channels. With good reasons.

For starters, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Besides this, SEO drives 1000+ more traffic than organic social media searches.

This notwithstanding, many sites struggle to attract significant search traffic. This ultimately affects sales and, conversely, revenue.

Do you sometimes wish you could find a comprehensive SEO best practice checklist to guide you? Well, say no more.

Here are 23 SEO best practices for 2022.

1. Add internal links from other relevant pages

An internal link is a reference to another page on the same website or the same domain. These are marked by a hyperlink that takes you to the reference page.

We also have external links that work much in the same way. The difference is that external links take a reader to a different domain or website.

Internal links support your search engine optimization efforts because:

  • They allow users to navigate a site better (user-friendliness)
  • Internal links allow Google to find, index, and understand the pages on your website
  • They establish an information hierarchy for a site
  • They help spread link equity or ranking power around websites

SEO best practices for Google stipulate that links need to have the following characteristics:

  • Be limited in number per page
  • They must be placed in the main text. This excludes footers and sidebar text.
  • Must be highlighted (for example, using an underline or different   font color) and be placed at the beginning of the text

2. Title Element (also known as title tags)

Eye-catching titles are one end of the equation; the other is optimizing them. This is where title tags come in.  

The tricky bit about creating a compelling title tag is that people must like it to click on it, and search engines must also view them favorably.

Tags are important for two reasons. First, they allow you to have a title relevant to your page. The second reason is that they show up in browser tabs.

Let’s discuss length. Google does not give specifics on how long title tags should be. However, most desktops and mobile phones will display the first 50-60 characters.

While you still need to go for concise titles, Google considers the whole title when crawling. This is the case even when the title is not displayed in full.

3. Build brand mentions (with or without links)

A brand mention happens when someone talks about your brand, product, or service.

Mentions come about in different ways. For example, someone might mention your company in a blog post. That gives you a mention.

If you have a product out there that you market vigorously, people will discuss it organically. This creates a buzz around your business, plus the social proof that comes with brand mentions.

Brand mentions can be with or without links. For example, someone might be referring your brand to another on social media and be kind enough to include a link to your site or product catalog. Other mentions will have your brand name minus a link, though audiences can still find you from an organic Google search.

Either way, Google uses name mentions as implied links and uses them as ranking factors. The more brand mentions you have, the better your SEO.

4. Target a topic with ‘search traffic potential

Search engines have come a long way from what they once were. Today, searchers can use different phrases in their queries, and search engines will recognize the connection from multiple queries.

This tells us that algorithms have developed to a point where they understand topical context, link it back to similar searches, and deliver the most relevant pages.    

To target a topic with maximum search traffic potential:

  • Use keyword research tools like Google word planner and   SEMrush. It’s easier to rank a topic with a focus key phrase with low difficulty and a higher volume.    
  • Determine what is trending: trending topics offer good SEO because people are already curious to know more, which may lead to more searches. However, the trend you use must be linked to your business or content.
  • Think about your audience: their demographics, thought processes, what brings them to your website, and so on

5. Target a topic in your wheelhouse

Every query on a search engine like Google yields numerous results. These are often more than you can read on pretty much any topic you can imagine.

While the bulk of information makes it easy for Google to show results, it has to work harder to find content that suits a query best. One way it does this is by looking at E.A.T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Targeting your wheelhouse means focusing on your areas of expertise, which boils down to your knowledge. This matters for search engine optimization because by improving the level of expertise showcased in your content, you also improve its quality.

Google has comprehensive guidelines on this, and showcasing expertise is guaranteed to help your ranking.

Why does Google prefer this anyway? The short answer is that users care about expertise. For this reason, it matters for SEO and Google as well.

6. Match search intent

Search intent or user intent is a user's primary goal when looking up something on a search engine.

Common search intents include informational, transactional, navigational, and commercial.

Satisfying search intent is one of Google’s top priorities, so it needs to be a key component of your strategy.

One thing you can do to help you nail search intent every time is to look at the user intent for your keyword before creating any content. For example, a keyword like 'buy a selfie stick' is obviously commercial. Another like ‘does rosemary help grow back hair’ has an informational intent.

However, even with clear user intent, you want to look at pages that rank for that keyword and create a page that closely matches the number 1 result.

7. Publish new content regularly targeting new keywords

Every SEO expert and marketer will tell you how important blogs are to a website. However, these only make an impact when you follow SEO writing best practices. One of these is updating your content frequently.

When you do this:

Your website indexing increases

When you keep your blogs active with frequent posting, these articles are indexed as new, fresh content. Therefore, we can say that regular posting is one way to make indexers aware of your site and crawl it often.

You Keep audiences more engaged

One organic way to get high search engine rankings is by producing creative, understandable, and interesting content for readers. Sites that do this naturally attract readers, and repeat audiences and get more shares of their content. These actions help with SEO.

You build authority and brand recognition

Posting fresh content consistently helps build brand recognition through increasing visibility. This then adds authority to your brand name. This will get you noticed by readers and search engines

8. Optimize images

Google looks at numerous factors when choosing which site to rank for specific queries. While optimized images alone are unlikely to push you to the top, they give you an edge over other sites.

Optimizing images is considered among SEO best practices for Wix and other platforms for several reasons. The first is that optimized images get better visibility, which in turn pulls more traffic.

But that’s not all. Optimized images will also:

Give a better user experience

Optimized images display correctly and make your site easier to navigate. However, none optimized images can, for example, cover text or take up an entire screen giving poor viewership.

Deliver faster site speeds

Speed is a top consideration for SEO best practices for developers.

Images that are too large or poorly optimized slow down your site. This annoys visitors, causing them to churn, which affects your ranking.

Here are some image-optimizing tips:

  • Compress your images
  • Add descriptive text
  • Ensure all images are mobile friendly
  • Use Schema markup to help search engines understand your data better
  • Optimize image file names

9. Write a compelling Meta description

You are losing out on ranking opportunities for your main keyword and keyword variations by not optimizing your Meta descriptions.

Your meta description is unseen by users but accessible to search engines. Engines will sometimes choose to show a different value for the meta instead of what is specified by the user. Nonetheless, it helps to always have unique meta descriptions on all your pages.

To get this right, add your target keywords in the description to make your search snippet more relevant to what the audience is looking for.

Something else is to keep the meta to a minimum of 200 characters. Then, optimize your meta to online phone searches to capture mobile phone users.

10. Include your target keywords in the Page Title

Page titles give search engines a good idea of the page content. This is also shown in search page results and social media snippets.

Some tips to ace this include:

  • Including search terms or keywords, users will recognize quickly
  • Keeping the page title short: the rule of thumb is to keep it under 60 characters
  • Using the power of words, for example, top, complete, amazing, excellent, and ultimate. This makes your title more appealing, which will entice more users to click on it
  • Add brackets in the title, as this is known to improve click-through rates. Let’s look at the example below:

a) Alt tags for Images –The Complete Guide (Updated for 2019 SEO)

b) Why Use Alt Tags For Images?

Which one of the above would you likely click on? The first would be a good guess because it’s catchy and tells the reader exactly what to expect.

11. URL structure

The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the web address you enter into a browser to access a specific page. These are also called links; many people will click on a link to direct them to a site.

This makes your URL the link between users and your content, and it affects your user experience and, consequently, your ranking.

Here are some best practices to get your URL structure right:

  • Follow a good URL structure
  • Make your domain cleaner by hiding the www prefix
  • Keep it short, simple and concise
  • Use meaningful keywords
  • Use hyphens to separate words. See the difference hyphens make in this example;

houstondesigners.com/blog/urlstructuralseobestpractices

houstondesigners.com/blog/url-structural-seo-best-practices

  • Remove stop words (and, or, of, a, the, to, an, for)
  • Use lowercase letters
  • Remove date from blog posts

URLs are building blocks of your site. Cleaner URLs are more trustworthy, are easy to share, and perform better in searches.

12. Optimize your H1 tags and headings

The H1 tag is different from the page title. The H1 tag is displayed on a page, while a page title is shown in social media snippets and browser windows.

The H1 tag and other headings are there to improve your page structure. In essence, they help search engines scan pages faster while making pages easier for users to read.

There are a few guidelines for this.

Optimization does not mean having tags marked H1, H2, and so on. Instead, have one H1 for each article. This is for the page title and appears at the top of the page.

After this, the main subheads are H2, and the subheadings are H3. Following this structure, the headings hierarchy looks as below:

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

13. Optimize for site links

Google doesn't allow you to select site links on your own. Instead, these are automatically added to the search snippet shown in search results.

This does not mean you have no control over site links.

Above is an example of a site link. As mentioned previously, the best way to go about this for SEO is to have internal links leading to site links. These should have proper anchor text.

This will help Google understand which pages are important and what they are about.

14. Use a short and descriptive URL

When it comes to URL and SEO: the shorter, the better.

Aside from that:

  • Use a single domain and subdomain whenever possible
  • Make it readable for human beings: if it's readable by human beings, it will be easier for search engines to crawl
  • Use keywords: users gauge them to know what to expect. In addition, URLs get copied and pasted regularly, which is powerful for SEO
  • Canonicalize URLs that serve similar content
  • Minimize parameter usage on URLs
  • Whenever it makes sense, match your URLs to titles
  • Eliminate stop words or use them sparingly when need be
  • Spaces work as word separators, but they render awkwardly: consider hyphens and underscores
  • Steer clear of repetitions and keyword stuffing

15. Write thorough content

SEO content is simply content designed to rank in search engines. And when it comes to SEO, content is crucial. So much so that businesses that publish content regularly enjoy 350% more traffic than those that don’t.

It that’s not incentive enough, then Google listing content as one of its top 3 ranking factors should do it.

Here are four brief reminders on how SEO content:

Keyword research

One way to go about this is to begin by doing keyword research, then write an article. This allows you to write about topics people are already looking for.

Keyword optimization

Learn how and where to use keywords naturally within text.

Content organization

Logically organize content, and arrange visuals carefully within the text. This is good for SEO and encourages visitors to stay on your page for longer. The longer readers stay, the better.

Content promotion

Increase visibility by building links (external and internal) and promoting your content on social media.

16. Use appropriate anchor text for internal links

Internal links are hyperlinks to other pages on your pages. These are great for SEO because they help Google see and index more pages from your website. In addition, they help readers find more relevant information about what they are reading.

The above is an internal link to a content marketing blog on Legiit.com.

As with the example above, pay special attention to the anchor (the visible part of a link). Similarly, always use meaningful anchor text that accurately describes the page it links to.

17. Make sure your pages load fast

Page speed is the time it takes for a page on your website to load once a user clicks on a link. Your website’s page speed affects everything from your conversion rate to your website rank.

Web speed is important to your SEO because Google does not want to deliver slow-loading results that put off users. Besides this, increasing your load time increases dwell time, reduces bounce rate, and increases page views and your organic search engine rankings.

So how do you optimize web speed? We thought you’d never ask. Here are some pointers:

18. Publish content related to keywords that users search for

A page has to serve a specific purpose for it to rank on Google. If a page does not answer a user's query, Google has no incentive to index or rank it.

This brings in keyword research. The best way to know what searchable content is is through keyword research. The first step is listing topics related to your business or blog's niche.

The next step is to create content that satisfies a specific search query. Ideally, each page should cover a single keyword. Fight the temptation to do general posts in a bid to cover numerous keywords. Again, your content must be readable for human beings first. The rest will follow.

19. Include your target keywords in the meta description

As we saw earlier, meta descriptions are hidden from the reader but not from search engines.

It’s always advisable to have good meta descriptions even though Google might decide to use different content from what the content owner prescribes.

For eCommerce sites, include product information like sizes, color, prices, and special offers.

20. Add breadcrumbs to all your pages

Breadcrumbs are often listed among SEO best practices, meaning implementing them will help your rank.

A breadcrumb menu is a menu trail that allows users to go to the previous page or the homepage.

Google has been recommending breadcrumbs for ages because they improve the user experience, and the search engine sometimes shows breadcrumbs in search snippets instead of the URL.

To leverage these, ensure that breadcrumbs are enabled on your website and that they are visible to audiences. In addition, it would be best if you also optimized them on mobile, so mobile users can easily click on links from the breadcrumb menu.

21. Make sure that your content is fast and easy to access on all devices

Google considers speed a ranking factor. With all else held constant, faster pages rank better than slower ones.

We highlighted some speed issues earlier and how to create a fast page. But how do you know if your age is first or slow? Google page insights are one place to check your speed. Go for a 90% score on both mobile and desktop.

Similarly, check that your site loads in under 3 seconds on mobile using a 3G network. Again, you can test this on this loading tool.

22. Use canonical URLs to specify your preferred domain and solve duplicate content issues

Canonical URLs are invisible to the reader but are part of the HTML code of a page.

Canonical URLs give search engines information about the preferred URL of a page.  

Additionally, canonical URLs resolve duplicated content matters.

To work to your benefit, begin by defining the canonical URL in the head section. These should be in a similar format to your home page.

Secondly,   pick the content you want Google to index if you have pages with duplicated content.

23. Get more backlinks

We looked at internal links, where you include hyperlinks to other content within your site. Backlinks use a similar premise, but these are links from other websites.    

These are particularly useful because they give you a vote of confidence. They speak to your site's authoritativeness and trustworthiness. They state that your site has valuable, credible, useful content.

The more of these ‘votes’ you have, the higher your site will rank in search engines. So, where do you get these from? Good question. Here is a list of sources:  

  • Editorial backlinks: when your site is mentioned and a link embedded in other publications
  • From guest blogs where you include a link to your site on pieces you send to be published as guest posts
  • In business profiles: links you include in your business profile, directories, and social networks
  • Backlinks for webinars
  • Free-tool backlinks: these are contained in a freebee like a loan calculator, a free version of an app, and so on  
  • Comment backlinks: you are typically allowed to leave a link to your site after posting comments on other blogs.

Final Thoughts

This is quite the list, isn't it? Well, SEO is no mean feat, but once you get on it consistently, the long-term rewards are enormous and long term.

Even better, this is not a journey you must embark on alone. If you need help building traction, get help from SEO experts as you learn the ropes.  

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