While SEO itself has been around for a long time, it has seen a lot of changes over the years.
What used to work for rankings 10 years ago can now become a means for penalizations—case in point, plagiarism, and spammy backlinks.
In 2023, SEO has become an intricate mesh-like field that has to be expertly navigated for the right results.
You have to make sure your website’s on-page elements are on point, and you have to make sure your content quality is spot on.
You also have to keep the backlink profile of your website authoritative.
There is a lot of stuff, to be precise.
In this post, we are going to be looking at some SEO tips that encompass some of the main stuff that you have to do for your website’s SEO.
1. Write Valuable, Well-Researched, and Helpful Content
Normally, we would have started out a list of SEO tips with something more general and “preliminary,” like keyword planning or website optimization.
But, considering the value and importance that helpful content has in SEO nowadays, we think talking about it (helpful content) first is necessary.
Recently, Google (we’re giving an example here; we don’t mean to imply that we’re only talking about Google SEO) released an update that aimed at rewarding such content that helps readers rather than only containing search engine-friendly elements, e.g., haphazard keyword use, out-of-place external linking, etc.
Due to this development, it became something of a rule that if your content is written such that it is helpful and satisfactory to the readers, it would get ranked high.
To make your content fall in this criterion, i.e., being helpful to the readers, there are a couple of things that you should do.
- Firstly, you should take care to do your research properly. Doing proper research will help you find helpful facts, figures, and other insights to include in your content. You will also be able to give a strong basis for your content, thus making your statements look like authoritative facts rather than conjectured guesswork.
- When writing the content itself, you should aim at making your writing simple and understandable. Your content will only be helpful if it can be understood by your readers in the first place. You should try and keep your wording simple, your sentences short, your passages limited, and your formatting organized.
- If you want to explain a concept or idea in your content, you should give examples and illustrations to aptly convey your point. This can, apart from making your content easier to understand, also lend a human touch to it.
- Once you are done writing your content, you should thoroughly check it to make sure there are no issues or imperfections in it. Too many errors can wreck the readability and coherence of your content, causing it to become less helpful.
Of all the tips that we’ve mentioned above, doing research and keeping your writing readable are probably the most important.
As far as research goes, you have to make sure that you do it extensively and use the right sources for it. This will help you find reliable material to use in your content.
On the other hand, maintaining readability and clarity in your content can be somewhat tougher.
A personal piece of advice that we can share in this regard is to use an online paraphrasing tool when the going gets tough.
In other words, if you can’t figure out how to make a piece of content readable and clearer, you can try using an online paraphraser to get some help.
Online paraphrasing tools do pretty much what they sound like. They paraphrase the content – a process that involves changing the words and sentences with different synonyms and replacements, respectively.
2. Find the Right Keywords and Use Them Right
While SEO does change from time to time, some of the main stuff stays the same. And one of the “main stuff” is keywords.
The importance and role of keywords in SEO are pretty much the same as they were decades ago. However, the way they are researched and used has evolved throughout that time.
Keyword stuffing, for example, may have been a handy way to get content ranked some time ago. But now it’s a one-way ticket to getting de-ranked.
To make sure that your SEO strategy works well and your website gets ranked near the top of the SERPs, you should be careful about picking the right, relevant keywords and using them properly where they need to be used.
Here are some tips that you can follow in this regard:
- For the first step, you should pick a good keyword research tool that you want to use. There are several of them available on the Internet. You should do your research and settle on one that provides accurate results.
- Then, you should evaluate how much effort and money you’re willing to spend on your SEO campaign. The purpose of doing this is to determine whether you want to target high-volume/competition keywords or low-volume/competition ones.
- Once you decide on this, you should go ahead and pick a few focus keywords (along with some suitable secondary ones) that are relevant to your niche/website. You have to stick to using these same keywords throughout your campaign to build your site’s authority on them.
- After the keywords are all done and decided, you have to use them in the right density (which is typically 1 – 2%) in places like your website’s/webpages’ meta descriptions, meta titles, web content, blogs, and so on.
We can’t delve into the finer details of keyword usage, but you can find a detailed guide here on this link.
3. Build High-Authority Backlinks for Your Website
Backlink building is one of the go-to ways for websites to improve their SERP rank.
Building backlinks is something that, if done right, can bring about fruitful results but, if done incorrectly, can become a means of penalization instead.
In December 2022, Google (once again, we’re giving an example) rolled out an update that simply neutralized the “link juice” passed on by low-quality, unnatural links.
This update did shake up the rankings fairly heavily, and it redefined the way websites acquired backlinks for themselves.
To get high-quality and helpful backlinks for your website, here are some tips that you can follow:
- One long-term method of getting organic backlinks to your website is to create and publish high-quality content. Doing this can induce other websites to link to yours when they want to present some proof for their research, i.e., by using your site as a reference. However, while doing this can bring your website into the eyes of organic linkers (that’s not a term…we’re using it just for now), it also increases the number of spammy links and toxic links. You should be careful about finding and disavowing those.
- When outreaching other websites for links (which happens to be the other commonly used method for link building), you should first look for ones that are relevant to your niche. This you can do by checking the keywords they are ranking for. You should also keep an eye on their traffic – the amount as well as the consistency – and other site performance measurements like DR, DA, etc. While the exact criterion can vary from person to person, you should be careful about not reaching out to any website that has very low or erratically changing traffic, ranking keywords, DR, DA, etc.
Conclusion
Staying on top of search engine guidelines and policies is necessary if you want to make it to the top of the SERPs. But while a lot of things change with time, a lot of things don’t.
In this post, we’ve discussed some golden timeless tips that you can follow during your SEO campaign to work your way to the top of the rankings.