8 Important SEO Basics You Shouldn't Ignore

8 Important SEO Basics You Shouldn’t Ignore


Search engine optimization (SEO) is about increasing website traffic by making the site more visible in search results. Many businesses and blogs are fighting for the same high rankings as you, but there’s always a chance for your site to shine on search engine results pages by ensuring your SEO is spot on.

Apart from choosing the right web host as your website’s new home, there are a few other things that make a website genuinely successful. But, if you own a website, you probably know what SEO is.

Even though you may not be doing it yet, you’ve almost definitely heard of it.

If you need some convincing as to the importance of SEO, here are some jaw-dropping statistics:

Stats like that make it crystal clear – you should follow at least the simple SEO best practices.

This article will urge you to take your first steps inbound marketing, making the case that basic SEO efforts can result in a massive increase in traffic to your site. It offers three critical SEO steps and gives you five more advanced tactics, any one of which could account for even greater website performance.

There’s no reason to put it off any longer – let’s get into the most important things you can do to get more website traffic!

Basic SEO Can Have a Huge Impact

Improving your website’s SEO is crucial, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. With just a few basic steps, you can go from having zero SEO to reaping the rewards of a successful strategy.

In this section, we cover the minimum steps that site owners should take to improve their SEO. These include optimizing your site’s design and content and focusing on external or internal links.

This is all you need to know about On Page SEO

1. Optimize Your Website’s On-Page Elements 

On-page optimization involves improving certain elements on your site so that search engines can better understand the content and structure of your web pages, enabling them to rank the website appropriately in search results.

Here’s a list of five crucial on-page SEO factors:

  • Use the right keywords. Your site must include those terms to rank high for specific search terms. They’re called keywords, and it’s crucial to analyze your offering and your target audience when choosing them. Define a list of customer characteristics, then use that profile and one of the many available keyword research tools to develop relevant keywords for your site. One tool you can use is Ubersuggest, which lets you enter a “seed” keyword and get a list of variations based on real-world searches.
  • Be secure. 93% of the traffic that Google facilitates is to HTTPS sites, and they’re committed to making that 100% in the near future. Search engines take security very seriously; a secure website will consistently rank higher in search results than one without.
  • Let titles and headings work for you. Search engines place greater importance on the keywords you’ve included in your titles and headings than those in the body of your blog posts or product descriptions, for example. Be sure to include your highest-value keywords in your headings and titles.
  • Ensure fast page load time. Search engines penalize slow-loading sites by lowering them in search rankings. If your pages load slowly, it’s probably because of large images, so controlling your photo file size is crucial. To check and optimize your page load time, you can use Website SEO Checker by Sitechecker.
  • Don’t fall behind on SEO standards. It’s essential to keep up with changes in how Google analytics ranks websites. At least once yearly, Google updates how sites will be ranked in search results. They may change the character limit for meta descriptions, modify how mobile-friendly design impacts ranking, or change their algorithm concerning video content, to name just a few examples. SEO-savvy business owners schedule a quick search several times yearly to learn about SEO standards changes. Keeping close tabs on your Google search console is an excellent way to see how people find your site online, so you can maximize your SEO strategy and help your keyword research.
Here is all you need to know about Content Marketing

2. Content Marketing – Publishing High-Quality Content

Search engines and humans use perceived authority to assess a website. Both are looking for indications that the site offers a high degree of knowledge and expertise in a specific area.

If a website has poor content quality, it won’t appear to a search engine as having authority in its niche, so the site will be penalized and pushed lower in the rankings. On the other hand, publishing high-value content that helps your site visitors will give you higher rankings in search results.

A site’s visitors care just as much about high-quality content as search engines do, so you’ll win twice by ensuring your site has great content. Keep your content current, detailed, and accurate, and focus on making it extremely useful to your target audience.

Some examples of improving your site’s content include creating regular blog posts that address your customers’ interests, ensuring your product or service descriptions contain better details than your competitors’, or publishing video tutorials or how-to articles that educate your audience. In short, that’s creating relevant content that your audience will love and surely return to read more.

This is not a one-time task – SEO demands fresh content. Try to publish something useful as soon as you can, but be sure to create a content calendar to keep the ball rolling!

3. Off-Page SEO (Managing Your Backlinks)

For the most part, off-page optimization involves two things: external links, or links from pages on your site to other sites, and backlinks, that is, links to your site from other sites. Paying attention to both can help your site rank higher in search results.

The key is establishing a link network where other businesses and informational sites link to your website. In a reciprocal relationship, your site will include links to the sites that link to yours. Backlinks and external links add value to your site, but only if they’re links from and to reputable sources. Low-quality or broken links will hurt your ranking.

Creating a link network involves reaching out to other businesses and organizations to obtain guest posts, with an agreement to include reciprocal links to each other’s content. 

In some ways, effective use of social media to promote your site could fall under the category of off-page SEO, but we’ll cover that later in this article.

Think mobile when selecting fonts and implementing functional elements ensuring that buttons and menus are easy to click

Refine Your SEO Strategy for Even More Traffic

Seeing that basic SEO involves just three very doable steps, we hope you’ll feel inspired to look into additional ways to improve your site’s performance.

Take your SEO efforts the extra mile with these five additional techniques for even better results.

4. Optimize for Mobile

Even if you’re not one of the millions of people glued to their smartphones for most of the day, your prospects and customers surely are.

Google knows that, and its search engine has been favouring mobile-friendly sites for a long time. Sites that are easy to use on mobile devices will rank higher in search results.

You can find out how usable your current site design is on mobile devices. Just check it with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. You’ll get a report on how easy it is for users to work with the site on their phone or tablet.

To ensure your site is more mobile-friendly, aim for a responsive design in which one version of your content displays differently depending on the device used to access it. Most website themes have a built-in responsive design, but some are up to you.

Consider how to make your quality content more accessible to mobile users. Think mobile when selecting fonts and implementing functional elements, ensuring that buttons and menus are easy to click using a finger on the screen of a mobile device.

5. Be Found by Voice Search

The search bar is still king, but initiating a voice search by shouting “Hey, Google,” waking Siri, or asking Amazon’s Alexa is becoming more prevalent daily. 30% of all web browsing and searches are done without touching the screen! These searches aren’t all about getting driving directions or looking up trivia either—a huge percentage of millennials use voice search as the first step to making an online purchase.

Getting included in the results for a voice search is all about your site’s authority. Only sites deemed experts in the niche will be returned.

A significant number of voice search responses come from featured snippets, search results that are highlighted in Google’s listings. They appear near the top of the page, getting much attention but not easy to get. Your website has to be considered a high-authority site, and your content needs to address the query entered directly.

If you can get your site recognized as a leading provider of accurate information on a given subject, there’s a good chance you’ll get into people’s voice search results.

Always consider videos for your SEO strategy

6. Use Video, Search Engines Love It

The video has become a preferred content format among web users and can significantly impact SEO and organic traffic.

A site with video on the homepage and in its blog posts is 53% more likely to appear on the first page of Google search results!

And then there’s the video-centric portion of Google’s search results. Mixed in with organic search results will be relevant image and video results from high-authority sites.

Video results will be included in Google search results for many types of searches, especially those that begin with “how to.” A featured video can earn a prominent position at the top of a search results page, while thumbnail images that appear as part of the other listings will catch users’ attention.

It should be noted that every video in Google’s search results will be a YouTube video. Google owns YouTube and uses it to produce relevant search results.

When you publish video content, be clever about using keywords in the video’s title, tags, and meta description. That way, searches will return the video even if the searcher was not explicitly looking for video content.

7. Target Local

Google, and other search engines are great at understanding what we’re searching for and delivering information that accurately answers our queries. What’s more, they’ve gotten better about presenting information in helpful ways, ensuring that their Search Engine Results Page (SERP) includes features that improve access to the information we need.

Google’s SERPs start with ads at the top that display local results and featured snippets and then come to the organic search engine results. Google Ads is another way that can help you get in front of a wider audience. It also comes with a keyword research tool which can massively help uncover any potential keywords you can use on your campaigns. All the other search engines currently available work similarly.

Local results account for the searcher’s location; they’re the key to getting more website traffic for many businesses close to the searcher. Users who search for “anything near me” or explicitly include the location they’re interested in will get local search results.

An important way to get a high-quality listing in local search results is to use Google My Business (GMB). This is a service that Google provides to business owners so they can manage what appears when users search for their business name. Keeping your GMB information current will enable Google to include your listing in local search results when people look for businesses in your niche.

Use social media as a tool to promote your content

8. Leverage Social Media

In the world of SEO, social media is somewhat of an outlier. While Google may index Tweets in search results, that’s about as far as the connection goes between actual SEO factors and social media. In other words, for now, social signals don’t directly impact your rankings in Google search results.

Nevertheless, although social media is not a ranking factor, it can significantly impact your website’s performance. Social media content gets indexed, so if a user’s search returns one of your Facebook posts, for example, a click into your site via the social media post could be imminent. In that scenario, it isn’t your website that got listed, so SEO is not the right word for it, but if the result is a new site visitor, who cares what you call it?

One of the main reasons social media helps websites is that social media users share information with each other. You can encourage followers to share your posts with their friends by tapping into what they’ll find compelling – factor in your ideal customer’s age, gender, interests, location, and other demographic details.

It’s also imperative to include social media buttons on your site. When visitors click an icon and post about your site, their followers will become new potential visitors.

Conclusion: Improve Your Site’s SEO Now!

Some little on-page SEO efforts, publishing stellar content, and earning a few high-quality backlinks. That’s all you need to worry about regarding basic SEO, and the payoff can be huge. 

With a little more effort, like ensuring your site is mobile-friendly and taking action to be found in local searches, you can get even greater results.

We hope this article encourages you to take the steps needed to improve your site’s SEO.

María is an enthusiast of cinema, literature and digital communication. As Content Coordinator at HostPapa, she focuses on the publication of content for the blog and social networks, organizing the translations, as well as writing and editing articles for the KB.

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